Relieved UK scientists are celebrating the news that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) appears to have smoothly entered Mars orbit on Friday night (March 10th). Entering orbit is one of the most critical times for a space mission and Friday night’s manoeuvre managed to boost the tension for all as it took place on the far side of the Red Planet – so no news of the progress could be received on Earth during the critical phase.

UK scientists, from Oxford, Cardiff and Reading Uni

Even when they mutually repel each other, material particles in a solution can still form clusters. Details on the conditions necessary for this seemingly contradictory, phenomenon have now been published, following a project supported by the Austrian Science Fund FWF. Though they come from the realm of theoretical physics these findings may be very important for understanding of the ordering of polymer-like entities — and increase the standing of the fledgling field of soft matter physics in Au

An international collaboration of astronomers has discovered a “super-Earth” orbiting in the cold outer regions of a distant solar system about 9,000 light-years away. The planet weighs 13 times as much as Earth, and at -330 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s one of the coldest planets ever discovered outside our solar system.

Andrew Gould, leader of the MicroFUN collaboration and professor of astronomy at Ohio State University , pointed to two key implications of the discovery. “Fir

Mind the Nanogaps: Penn Researchers Create the First Reliable Method for Making Gaps for Nanotech AppsMind the Nanogaps: Penn Researchers Create the First Reliable Method for Making Gaps for Nanotech Apps

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they have bridged a major obstruction in the creation of nanoscale electronics by developing a simple, reliable and observable method of creating tiny, tiny gaps between electrodes.

Such “nanogaps” will

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles (ONCE) have developed a Braille keyboard for PCs that has some unique features. The keyboard provides more applications for blind people and is particularly useful for scientific texts and musical scores.

The new keyboard, which connects to the PC through the USB port, will make using a computer much easier for blind people who are accustomed to using Braille typewriter

Twenty years ago, in the night between 13 and 14 March 1986, ESA’s Giotto spacecraft encountered Comet Halley. It was ESA’s first deep space mission, and part of an ambitious international effort to solve the riddles surrounding this mysterious object.

The adventure began when Giotto was launched by an Ariane 1 rocket (flight V14) on 2 July 1985. After three revolutions around the Earth, the on-board motor was fired to inject it into an interplanetary orbit.

After a crui

Saturn’s moon Enceladus is the source of Saturn’s E-ring, confirms research published today.

Writing in the journal Science, scientists show how a plume of icy water vapour bursting out of the South Pole of Enceladus replenishes the water particles that make up the E-ring and creates a dynamic water-based atmosphere around the small moon. The E-ring is Saturn’s outermost ring and is composed of microscopic particles. It is very diffuse and stretches between the orbit of two of Sat

If blown up in size, it would not have a chance in the car factory, but the microscopic conveyer belt built by Simon Bending’s team in the Department of Physics at the University of Bath and collaborators in Japan and the USA, could just be the next big thing for improving devices relying on the elusive properties of superconductors (Nature Materials, Advanced Online Publication March 12 2006). It’s not your standard rubber band on cylinders though – it moves in an erratic way, a quick jolt t

Images returned from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have yielded evidence that the geologically young south polar region of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus may possess reservoirs of near-surface liquid water that erupt to form geysers of the kind found in Yellowstone National Park.

This finding and others are being reported today by the Cassini Imaging Science Team in the journal Science.

“We realize that this is a radical conclusion – that we may have evidence for liqu

Finding Supports Theory that Single Collision Created Ninth Planet’s Three Satellites

Using new Hubble Space Telescope observations, a research team led by Dr. Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Dr. Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute has found that Pluto’s three moons are essentially the same color – boosting the theory that the Pluto system formed in a single, giant collision.

Publishing their findings in an Inter

Cassini data obtained during a close flyby of the Saturn moon Enceladus support an observation that large amounts of water are spewing into space from the tiny moon’s surface. This water originates near south polar “hot spots” on the moon, possible locations for the development of primitive life in the solar system.

Announced by the Cassini Imaging Science Team in today’s issue of Science, the theory is bolstered by measurements from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (C

A new research project led by academics at the University of Southampton will look at how spatial connections can be managed and will use air traffic control as a model.

The ambitious £1.5m, three-year project is called ’Spatially Embedded Complex Systems Engineering’ (SECSE). It is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and has brought together experts in neuroscience, artificial intelligence, geography and complex systems, to unders

After a successful launch on 28 December 2005, GIOVE A began transmitting navigation signals on 12 January 2006. Work is currently being performed to check the quality of these signals.

In space, the success of a mission relies on the achievement of a series of milestones. This is especially true for a pioneering mission such as GIOVE A, the first Galileo satellite, launched late last year under the European Space Agency’s responsibility.

Manufacture, launch, reaching fi

Temperatures hotter than the interiors of stars

Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares main

Electronics and computing engineers from the University of Ulster have teamed up with neuroscientists, physicists and biologists from across Europe to investigate the incorporation of the senses we humans take for granted into intelligent computer systems of the future.

The multi-disciplinary team concentrated on attempting to replicate in silicon the biological brain’s ability to capture data from the senses of touch and sight. In biological life forms, the brain can combine inf

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have launched a publicly-available microbial database to host a range of microbial genome sequences.

The VBI Microbial Database (VMD), which is described in a recent article published in Nucleic Acids Research (Vol.34, D379-D381), contains genome sequence and annotation data for the plant pathogens Phytophthora sojae and Phytophthora ramorum. The purpose of the database is to make widely available to researc