Physicists at JILA have demonstrated an ultrafast laser technique for “seeing” once-hidden electronic behavior in semiconductors, which eventually could be useful in more predictable design of optoelectronic devices, including semiconductor lasers and white light-emitting diodes.

The work at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder, is described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Data from X-ray observatory surveys show that black holes are much more numerous and evolved differently than researchers would have expected, according to a Penn State astronomer.

“We wanted a census of all the black holes and we wanted to know what they are like,” says Dr. Niel Brandt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics. “We also wanted to measure how black holes have grown over the history of the Universe.”

Brandt and other researchers have done just that by

For scientists eying distant planets and solar systems for signs of alien activity, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Carol Cleland suggests the first order of business is to keep an open mind.

It may be a mistake to try to define life, given such definitions are based on a single example — life on Earth, said Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology. The best strategy is probably to develop a “general theory of

In the search for life on other worlds, scientists can listen for radio transmissions from stellar neighborhoods where intelligent civilizations might lurk or they can try to actually spot planets like our own in habitable zones around nearby stars.

Either approach is tricky and relies on choosing the right targets for scrutiny out of the many thousands of nearby stars in our galactic neighborhood.

Margaret Turnbull, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, ha

University of Minnesota researchers Renata Wentzcovitch and Koichiro Umemoto and Philip B. Allen of Stony Brook University have modeled the properties of rocks at the temperatures and pressures likely to exist at the cores of Jupiter, Saturn and two exoplanets far from the solar system. They show that rocks in these environments are different from those on Earth and have metallic-like electric and thermal conductivity. These properties can produce different terrestrial-type planets, with long

Face recognition technology that could revolutionise security systems worldwide has been developed by computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University. The new specialist software can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds.

Other 3D systems that have been trialled have proved unworkable because of the time it takes to construct a picture and an inaccurate result.

The ground-breaking invention, by experts in the University’s Materials and Engineer

Imagine Captain Kirk being beamed back to the Starship Enterprise and two versions of the Star Trek hero arriving in the spacecraft’s transporter room.

It happened 40 years ago in an episode of the TV science fiction classic, and now scientists at the University of York and colleagues in Japan have managed something strikingly similar in the laboratory – though no starship commander was involved.

The first experimental demonstration of quantum telecloning has been

The Milky Way’s fastest observed pulsar is speeding out of the galaxy at more than 670 miles a second, propelled largely by a kick it received at its birth 2.5 million years ago.

Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), 10 radio telescopes spanning 5,000 miles from Hawaii to the U.S. Virgin Islands, James Cordes, professor of astronomy at Cornell University, his former student Shami Chatterjee, now of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and colleagues studied t

For the first time, scientists have created a “spin triplet” supercurrent through a ferromagnet over a long distance. Achieved with a magnet developed at Brown University and the University of Alabama, the feat upends long-standing theories of quantum physics – and may be a boon to the budding field of “spintronics,” where the spin of electrons, along with their charge, is harnessed to power computer chips and circuits. Results are published in Nature.

Superconductivity occurs w

The discovery makes the fiery environment within a typical spiral or starburst galaxy look almost pastoral. Cornell researchers using the Spitzer Space Telescope say distant galaxies contain an inferno of very young, massive and violently evolving stars, packed together in tiny but extremely powerful cosmic globs.

The key to the discovery, paradoxically, is in the presence of delicate, glittery crystalline silicates called Forsterite. These are glassy particles that exist in the

Astronomers of the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory (UK) have led an international team which used the Parkes radio telescope in Australia to find a new kind of cosmic object which sends out radio flashes. These flashes are very short and very rare: one hundredth of a second long, the total time the objects are visible amounts to only about one tenth of a second per day.

The discovery will be published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

Eleven sources

A team of astronomers from the UK, USA, Australia, Italy and Canada using the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in eastern Australia has found a new kind of cosmic object – small, compressed ’neutron stars’ that show no activity most of the time but once in a while spit out a single burst of radio waves. The discovery is published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

The new objects – dubbed Rotating Radio Transients or RRATs – are likely to be related to conventional radio pulsars (sma

The European Space Agency (ESA) is launching a mission to Mercury, in which there is significant Finnish involvement. On Thursday 9 February 2006, the Science Programme Committee of the ESA held a meeting to approve the agency’s next cornerstone programme, the spacecraft named BepiColombo, which is due to be launched towards Mercury in 2013.

The ESA is building a planetary probe which will end up on a low elliptical orbit around Mercury for at least one year. The orbiter will ca

Unique views of Earth afforded by a pioneering twin ESA radar satellite flight has brought an extra dimension to maps of Canada’s newest territory, the results winning praise from the Canadian government.

Nunavut is the latest and also largest territory of Canada: located up in the frozen northeast, Nunavut has a population of only around 29 300 but an area the size of Western Europe. The Canadian government is currently refining and updating its geographic information for the

Food poisoning may become a thing of the past, if commercial kitchens link their appliances to the Internet. Unique technology developed recently in Europe for this environment also promises to reduce the risk of fire and to slash maintenance costs.

“The idea of remotely monitoring and controlling catering equipment over the Internet isn’t new,” says Stephen Read, coordinator of the IST project I’MOK. “But nobody succeeded in doing it. Our plug-and-play software and hardware is a ma

In a coming issue, Astronomy & Astrophysics presents new laboratory results that provide some important clues to the possible origins of exotic mineral grains in interplanetary dust. Studying interplanetary grains is currently a hot topic within the framework of the NASA Stardust mission, which recently brought back some samples of these grains. They are among the most primitive material ever collected. Their study will lead to a better understanding of the formation and evolution of our Solar