To celebrate the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 16 years of success, the two space agencies are releasing the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of Messier 82 (M82), a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions.

Located 12 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the ’Cigar Galax

A team of Control Engineering researchers at the Public University of Navarra has successfully finalised their work on QFT Multivariable Robust Control of Darwin-type Satellites with large flexible structures, undertaken for the European Space Agency (ESA).

The scientists have designed a new automatic control system capable of governing the Darwin Project satellite telescopes.

The Darwin Project

The European Space Agency is currently developing what is known as the Darw

The program has been used in DeKalb County and will be installed throughout Georgia. The program is also slated to be used in 35 other states.

Your city has 48 hours to vaccinate every man, woman and child to prevent a dangerous pandemic. Where do you put the clinics, how many health care workers will you need and how do you get 2 million people to a finite number of emergency clinics?

The logistics of handling all those panicked people, health care workers, vaccination

Try mixing caramel into vanilla ice cream — you will always end up with globs and swirls of caramel. Scientists are finding that galaxies may distribute themselves in similar ways throughout the universe and in places where there is lots of so-called dark matter.

“Our findings suggest that unseen dark matter — which emits no light but has mass — has had a major effect on the formation and evolution of galaxies, and that bright active galaxies are only born within dark matter

A Danish-led research project has made encouraging progress toward using advanced mathematics as the basis of an improved method for indexing and searching medical images in the huge digital databases of clinics and hospitals.

Completed in November 2005, the DSSCV consortium’s long-term goal was to contribute to software tools allowing doctors and hospital technicians to quickly search and match X-rays, magnetic resonance images and computed 3D tomography scans, particularly of the cra

Scientists have secured their first look at the birth of monstrous stars that shine 100 000 times more brightly than the Sun, thanks to ESA’s Infrared Space Observatory (ISO).

The discovery allows astronomers to begin investigating why only some regions of space promote the growth of these massive stars.

Space is littered with giant clouds of gas. Occasionally, regions within these clouds collapse to form stars. “One of the major questions in the field of study is why do

Through a project supported by the European Space Agency, the UK-based company Wired Ocean Ltd can now provide enhanced Internet access for ships at sea at a much lower cost than was previously possible.

Although satellite links at sea are quite common, the speed of data transmission for most users is very low, from 600 bps to 64 kbps, with around 10 kbps being a typical speed. This, combined with usage costs of around € 20 per megabyte, has created an environment in which many s

Mobile phones can save lives in emergencies, but are not widely used among those considered to be most at risk: elderly people and sufferers of age-related and chronic diseases. A new device gives users the benefits of instant wireless communication, combined with location detection, without the complications of normal mobiles.

Validated for commercial use in the MobilAlarm project with funding from the European Commission’s eTEN Programme, the small and simple mobile device allows user

Child pornographers will soon have a harder time escaping prosecution thanks to a stunning new technology in development at Binghamton University, State University of New York, that can reliably link digital images to the camera with which they were taken, in much the same way that tell-tale scratches are used by forensic examiners to link bullets to the gun that fired them.

“The defense in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this person’s camera or

Raw code for “unbreakable” encryption, based on the principles of quantum physics, has been generated at record speed over optical fiber at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The work, reported today at the SPIE Defense & Security Symposium in Orlando, Fla.,* is a step toward using conventional high-speed networks such as broadband Internet and local-area networks to transmit ultra-secure video for applications such as surveillance.

The N

Dutch researcher Maarten de Rijke and his co-workers Gilad Mishne and Krisztian Balog have developed a new programme that can trace and explain significant changes in mood patterns on the Internet. MoodViews is a collection of instruments that maps the mood of bloggers as they write their message.

Internet diaries, blogs, are an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. The opinions and experiences of tens of millions of people can be followed every day. Researchers from the P

Bilingual search for long-term preservation resources available free of charge

Access to German and international sources of information

The “nestor” network of expertise in long-term preservation of digital resources has just put into practice an agreement made in April 2005 between the Australian colleagues working on the PADI (Preserving Access to Digital information) portal at the National Library of Australia and the nestor partner, Goettingen State and University

Hubble has captured the most detailed images to date of the open star clusters NGC 265 and NGC 290 in the Small Magellanic Cloud – two sparkling sets of gemstones in the southern sky.

Two new composite images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope show a myriad of stars in crystal clear detail. The brilliant open star clusters, NGC 265 and NGC 290, are located about 200,000 light-years away and are roughly 65 light-years across.

Using data from ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, an international group of astrophysicists discovered that one spinning neutron star doesn’t appear to be the stable rotator scientists would expect. These X-ray observations promise to give new insights into the thermal evolution and finally the interior structure of neutron stars.

Spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars, are generally known to be highly stable rotators. Thanks to their periodic signals, emitted either i

Laser that could save computer industry from ’interconnect bottleneck’ uses quantum paint — and a hairdryer

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a laser that could help save the $200-billion dollar computer chip industry from a looming crisis dubbed the “interconnect bottleneck.”

But this isn’t a laser in the stereotypical sense — no corded, clunky boxes projecting different coloured lights. In fact, Professor Ted Sargent, of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. De

Scientists observe strong spectral signals from spikes on gold particles

New optics research from Rice University’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics suggests that tiny gold particles called nanostars could become powerful chemical sensors.

The findings are available online and due to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Nano Letters.

Nanophotonics is a rapidly growing field of study that looks at ways to generate and manipulate light using ultrasmall, e