Evidence never dies in the popular TV show Cold Case. Nor do some traces of life disappear on Earth, Mars, or elsewhere. An international team of scientists,* including researchers from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory, has developed techniques to detect miniscule amounts of biological remains, dubbed biosignatures, in the frozen Mars-like terrain of Svalbard, a island north of Norway. This technology will be used on future life-search missions to the Red Planet. The work is

Very Cool Brown Dwarf Discovered Around Star in the Solar Neighbourhood

Using Eso’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, an international team of researchers [1] discovered a brown dwarf belonging to the 24th closest stellar system to the Sun. Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects that are neither stars nor planets. This object is the third closest brown dwarf to the Earth yet discovered, and one of the coolest, having a temperature of about 750 degrees Centigrade. It orbits a very sma

The image, taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, shows Crater De Gasparis on the Moon.

The AMIE camera obtained this image on 14 January 2006 from a distance of about 1090 kilometres with a ground resolution of approximately 100 metres per pixel.

Crater De Gasparis is located close to the Mare Humorum, at longitude 51.2° West and latitude 26.0° South, on the lower left quarter of the Moon’s Earth-facing side. It has a

A revolutionary manner of distributing TV programmes via the Internet, the new peer-to-peer Tribler system, based on open-source software, has been launched.

Various public broadcasting corporations, commercial TV stations and cable and telecommunications companies are all showing keen interest in the distribution of television programmes via the Internet. While the current method makes use of centrally located computer systems, research is now being conducted at Delft Un

The revolutionary model plane has been developed as part of a £6.2m programme, involving engineers from the University of Leicester, funded jointly by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and BAE Systems.

The five-year programme is called FLAVIIR – flapless air vehicle integrated industrial research – and involves teams from Leicester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Southampton, Swansea, Warwick, York and London. Manchester University’s Goldstein Aeronautical Resea

Paper labels in supermarkets could become a thing of the past, thanks to a revolutionary digital display system that could also give mobile phones a much longer life.

The new type of electronic display could save retailers millions by allowing product information on the supermarket shelves to be changed globally, at the touch of a button. Labour costs linked to price changes in stores could plummet and supermarkets will be doing their bit for the environment by scrapping the paper

The first 3D maps of the UK underworld are to be created in a new £2.2m project which will save the UK millions of pounds by reducing the amount we dig up our roads.

There are enough pipes and cables buried under our streets to stretch to the moon and back ten times, but we don’t know where many of them are. Researchers from the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham will help to locate them, by finding a way to integrate existing digital and paper-based records and link these with

The first measuring period for external users at the new X-ray radiation source VUV-FEL at DESY in Hamburg has been successfully concluded. Since its official startup in August 2005, a total of 14 research teams from ten countries have carried out first experiments using the facility’s intense laser beam. “Both the external researchers and the DESY team gained most valuable experience with the new machine,” DESY research director Professor Jochen Schneider comments. “As a worldwide unique pioneer

A team of Williams College faculty and students is preparing to scientifically observe the total eclipse of the Sun that will sweep across the far side of Earth on March 29. Six undergraduates are joining Jay Pasachoff, Bryce Babcock, and Steven Souza of the astronomy and physics departments, who have worked together on a series of expeditions, most recently to study Pluto and its moon Charon.

The expedition is to Kastellorizo, a small island east of Rhodes in the Greek Dodecanes

The offered invention opens up a new avenue for providing new agents at the disposal of combating the emerging resistance to existing antibiotics. The obtained…

A cold-induced expression system for temperature regulated gene expression; particularly the over-expression of hydrophobic or thermo labile proteins.Further…

A heatable array for the amplification and chemical analysis of nucleic acids.

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A new platform to help small and medium-sized government organisations (SMGOs) implement e-government strategies – with the emphasis on cross-border cooperation – has been created and tested by a pan-European team.

With people, goods, and now services, able to move freely within the Member States of the European Union, it’s perhaps surprising how exchanging information across borders can still present such a barrier. Yet even in border regions, cities geographically close to each

A study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows that computerized systems that match fingerprints using interoperable minutiae templates–mathematical representations of a fingerprint image–can be highly accurate as an alternative to the full fingerprint image. NIST conducted the study, called the Minutiae Interoperability Exchange Test (MINEX), to determine whether fingerprint system vendors could successfully use a recently approved standard* for minutiae data rather t

In an article to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, two British astronomers present new numerical simulations of how planetary systems form. They find that, in the early stages of planetary formation, giant protoplanets migrate inward in lockstep into the central star.

The current picture of how planetary systems form is as follows: i) dust grains coagulate to form planetesimals of up to 1 km in diameter; ii) the runaway growth of planetesimals leads to the formation of

TU Delft Researchers have shed new light on the formation of nanoscale surface features, such as nano ripples. These features are important because they could be useful as templates for growing other nanostructures. The scientific journal Physical Review Letters published an article this week on the research in Delft.

Some remarkable geometrical features may appear for instance on a glass surface when it is bombarded with ions, such as triangular patterns and ripples. Scientists study