Was that Xanex or Xanax? Or maybe Zantac? If you’re a health care professional you’d better know the difference–mistakes can be fatal.

An estimated 1.3 million people in the United States alone are injured each year from medication errors, and the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has been working to reduce the possibilities of these errors, such as a documented case in which a patient needed an injection of Narcan but received Norcuron and went into cardiac a

A team of scientists from the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magnetic states, known as “displaced vortex states”, that will allow an increase in the size of MRAMs (which are not deleted when the computer is switched off). The research has been published in Physical Review Letters and Applied Physi

This animation, made from images taken by the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft, illustrates a special pointing mode, the so-called ’target-tracking’ mode.

The images show crater Lichtenberg in the Oceanus Procellarum region on the Moon, centred on an area located at 66.8° West, 32.6° North.

The AMIE camera obtained the images from a distance of between 2064 and 2162 kilometres with a ground resolution of between approxi

Astronomers using the 76-m Lovell radio telescope at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory have discovered a very strange pulsar that helps explain how pulsars act as ‘cosmic clocks’ and confirms theories put forward 37 years ago to explain the way in which pulsars emit their regular beams of radio waves – considered to be one of the hardest problems in astrophysics. Their research, now published in Science Express, reveals a pulsar that is only ‘on’ for part of the time. The st

The fastest ever observations of protons moving within a molecule open a new window on fundamental processes in chemistry and biology, researchers report today in the journal Science.

Their capturing of the movements of the lightest and therefore speediest components of a molecule will allow scientists to study molecular behaviour previously too fast to be detected. It gives a new in-depth understanding of how molecules behave in chemical processes, providing opportunities for

The application of ’displaced vortex states’ – small magnetic circular movements of just a few thousandths of a millimetre – may accelerate the arrival of a new type of magnetic memory (MRAM) that does not disappear when a computer is switched off

A team of scientists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in collaboration with colleagues from the Argonne National Laboratory (USA) and the Spintec laboratory (Grenoble, France), has for the first time produced microscopic magn

A new software system that enables faster and more comprehensive analysis of vast quantities of information is so effective that it not only creates order out of chaos and allows computers to perform tasks that before only people could perform, it is also creating new information from old data.

“Our greatest contribution was to create a framework for integrating structured and unstructured information,” says Dr Babis Theodoulidis, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester’s Inst

Mechanical engineers at Purdue University have developed software that promises to increase the efficiency of creating parts for everything from cars to computer hardware by making it possible to quickly evaluate and optimize complex designs.

The new approach integrates the design and analysis processes, which are now carried out separately. Currently, the geometry of a part is first created using computer-aided design, or CAD, software. This geometry is then converted into a me

Astronomers have witnessed a never-seen-before event in observations by ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft – a collision between a pulsar and a ring of gas around a neighbouring star.

The rare passage, which took the pulsar plunging into and through this ring, illuminated the sky in gamma- and X-rays. It has revealed a remarkable new insight into the origin and content of ‘pulsar winds’, which has been a long-standing mystery. The scientists described the event as a natural but ‘scaled-

Interferometry Helps Discover Envelopes Around Supergiant Stars

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Cerro Paranal, Chile, and the CHARA Interferometer at Mount Wilson, California, a team of French and North American astronomers has discovered envelopes around three Cepheids, including the Pole star. This is the first time that matter is found surrounding members of this important class of rare and very luminous stars whose luminosity varies in a very regu

Making tubes useful often means joining them to other tubes and linking them together in networks. Easy enough to do with standard water pipes — but on the nanoscale, joining nanotubes is hard to do.

Efforts to link nanotubes have usually begun with the most familiar kind, cylinders whose structure is equivalent to one or more rolled-up sheets of a layered crystal like graphite. Now researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Center for Electron Mi

From one international cooperation to another, the crew of the International Space Station (ISS), American William McArthur and Russian Valery Tokarev, yesterday congratulated the Olympic athletes gathered in Turin, Italy, for the closing ceremony of the 20th Olympic Winter Games.

In a special message played to athletes and spectators gathered in the Stadio Olimpico, McArthur and Tokarev, the ISS Expedition 12 crew, applauded the accomplishments of the world’s athletes who competed in the

This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of “grand design spirals”, and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released.

Giant galaxies weren’t assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (the Pinwheel Galaxy). It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy bey

At the latest meeting of the European Space Agency’s Earth Observation Programme Board, which took place at ESA’s Headquarters in Paris on 23 and 24 February, ESA received the green light from its Member States to build and launch a CryoSat recovery mission, CryoSat-2.

The launch of the CryoSat spacecraft was unfortunately aborted on 8 October 2005 due to a malfunction of its Rockot launcher, which resulted in the total loss of the spacecraft.
“This decision is very important,

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Ausonia Mensa massif on Mars.

The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 506 with a ground resolution of approximately 37.6 metres per pixel. The scenes show the region of Hesperia Planum, containing the massif, at approximately 30.3° South and 97.8° East. North is to the right in these images.

Ausonia Mensa is a large remnant mountain with several impact c

If you’re watching the Winter Olympics, you know that snow and ice are an integral part of the sports. But did you know that snow and ice need to be different for each sport? NASA scientist Peter Wasilewski’s studies of ice using polarized light create beautiful colored pictures of the snow and ice, and enable people to see if the snow and ice is “right” for each type of sport.

Wasilewski, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., uses polarized light t