A biometric security system which had been developed by specialists of the Scientific Production Association “INFORMATION” was awarded the best innovation product title at the 12th International Exhibition “Guarding, Security and Fire Protection MIPS-2006”. The system’s peculiarity lies in utilization of a 3D image of the face for identification of a person. Only within a second and a half, the turnstile equipped by this system would create and analyze such image, and take a decision based on rec

Until a couple of years ago, scientists thought the dark equatorial regions of Titan might be liquid oceans.

New radar evidence shows they are seas — but seas of sand dunes like those in the Arabian or Namibian Deserts, a University of Arizona member of the Cassini radar team and colleagues report in Science (May 5).

Radar images taken when the Cassini spacecraft flew by Titan last October show dunes 330 feet (100 meters) high that run parallel to each other for hund

Using an entirely new technology, a research team from Umeå University in Sweden has succeeded in controlling and converting energy from the random movement of atoms.

“You could say that we have found a detox cell where drunken atoms can sober up,” says physicist Peder Sjölund. The findings are being published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

We are surrounded by random, staggering, movements. We don’t notice it, but particles collide with each other in an uncont

A little more than one year after the spectacular descent of ESA’s Huygens on Saturn’s giant moon Titan, scientists from the probe’s Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer (DISR) have released two new movies of the descent. These represent the best visual product from the mission obtained so far and the most realistic way yet to experience the landing on a far-away world.

These movies were built thanks to the data collected by DISR on 14 January 2005, during the 147-minutes plunge through Titan

Like an interplanetary spaceship carrying passengers, meteorites have long been suspected of ferrying relatively young ingredients of life to our planet. Using new techniques, scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism have discovered that meteorites can carry other, much older passengers as well–primitive, organic particles that originated billions of years ago either in interstellar space, or in the outer reaches of the solar system as it was beginning

Thanks to a series of highly successful projects in the EUREKA MEDEA+ Cluster, Europe leads the way in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for the production of future generations of semiconductor chips. As a result of strong co-operation between chipmakers, equipment suppliers and research centres, European companies will dominate the world market for equipment and materials. This is expected to generate some 18,000 jobs, mainly at a high technical level, as well as a €1 billion turnover b

Measuring the rotation period of a rocky planet like the Earth is easy, but similar measurements for planets made of gas, such as Saturn, pose problems. Researchers from JPL, Imperial College London and UCLA present new results in this week’s Nature (4th May 2006) that may solve the mystery. Using the magnetometer instrument on Cassini, they have found a clear period in the magnetic field of the planet that they believe indicates a day of 10 hours and 47 minutes.

This is a whole 8 minutes s

For the past four years, while ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has been slewing between different targets ready for the next observation, it has kept its cameras open and used this spare time to quietly look at the heavens. The result is a ’free-of-charge’ mission spin-off – a survey that has now covered an impressive 25 percent of the sky.

The rapid slewing of the satellite across the sky means that a star or a galaxy passes in the field of view of the telescope for ten

During April, computers in the UK have been working overtime in the fight against avian flu. As part of an international collaboration, computers at eleven UK universities and research labs have put in one hundred thousand hours of time searching for possible drug components against the avian flu virus H5N1. The analysis used a computing Grid, a new network that brings together worldwide computer resources to solve scientific problems.

The computing Grid used in the UK was originally

A European research project has developed a prototype infrared-camera system that substantially enhances human visual perception in poor visibility conditions such as fog, heavy rain and at night.

The system doubled airline pilots’ ability to detect obstacles in tests simulating poor visibility, and in road tests it boosted automobile drivers’ vision up to 400 per cent. It could eventually be used aboard commercial airliners and in cars to improve safety.

Penn State researchers have developed software that allows databases to “talk to each other” automatically without compromising the security of the data and metadata because the queries, data communicated and other information are encrypted.

The Privacy-preserving Access Control Toolkit (PACT) acts like a filter but is resilient to eavesdropping or other attacks because of the encryption.

“The software automatically regulates access to data, so some information can be exchan

An international collaboration including researchers from Amsterdam, Paris, Baton Rouge (USA) and Lund University, (Sweden), has made a breakthrough which moves some of the mathematics of quantum mechanics off of the blackboard and into the laboratory – from theory to reality. Using extremely short pulses of light, new knowledge about the wave-like nature of matter can be obtained.

The Lund group presently holds the world record for producing short laser pulses. In the High-power laser faci

The University of Reading has developed a laser laboratory that is capable of showing some of the fastest physical processes known. The Ultrafast Laser Laboratory (ULL) can generate high energy laser light pulses with durations less than one tenth of a millionth of a millionth of a second long. The pulses can be tailored to have a particular shape and their properties can be measured.

The Department of Physics and the School of Systems Engineering at the University received funding from t

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used lasers to cool and trap erbium atoms, a “rare earth” heavy metal with unusual optical, electronic and magnetic properties. The element has such a complex energy structure that it was previously considered too wild to trap. The demonstration, reported in the April 14 issue of Physical Review Letters,* might lead to the development of novel nanoscale devices for telecommunications, quantum computing or fine-tuning the

Physicists at JILA have performed the first-ever precision measurements using ultracold molecules, in work that may help solve a long-standing scientific mystery–whether so-called constants of nature have changed since the dawn of the universe.

The research, reported in the April 14 issue of Physical Review Letters,* involved measuring two phenomena simultaneously–electron motion, and rotating and vibrating nuclei–in highly reactive molecules containing one oxygen atom

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is providing astronomers with extraordinary views of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 as it disintegrates before our eyes. Recent Hubble images have uncovered many more fragments than have been reported by ground-based observers. These observations provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the demise of a comet nucleus.

Amateur and professional astronomers around the world have been tracking the spectacular disintegration of 73P/Schwassmann-Wach