Big manufacturing jobs, especially those in the defense industry that involve management of extensive supply chains, often require resources and expertise that many believe are beyond the capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Recent work by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and colleagues at Pittsburgh’s Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology, however, demonstrates the capabilities of simulation and visualization technologies for

Scientists from across the world came together in London on 12-13 January to review the scientific and technical status of the LISA mission, the world’s first gravitational wave observatory, at a meeting organised by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and the Institute of Physics.

Scheduled for launch in 2016, LISA will be the largest scientific instrument ever constructed, consisting of three spacecraft, each separated by 5 million kilometres (3 million miles). Its task will

European funding has now been agreed to start designing the world’s largest telescope. The ‘Square Kilometre Array’ (SKA) will be an international radio telescope with a collecting area of one million square metres – equivalent to about 200 football pitches – making SKA 200 times bigger than the University of Manchester’s Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and so the largest radio telescope ever constructed. Such a telescope would be so sensitive that it could detect TV Broadcasts coming from

An MIT researcher’s atom-by-atom simulation of cracks forming and spreading may help explain how materials fail in nanoscale devices, airplanes and even in the Earth itself during a quake. This work, which could impact a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, appears in the Jan. 19 issue of Nature.

“Classical theories of crack dynamics are only valid in a small range of material behavior,” said author Markus J. Buehler, principal investigator in the Atomistic Mech

Research may influence future development of semiconductors, nanocomposites

Physicists at Boston College have for the first time shown that carbon nanotubes can be stretched at high temperature to nearly four times their original length, a finding that could have implications for future semiconductor design as well as in the development of new nanocomposites.

Single-walled carbon nanotubes are tiny cylinders thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair

As nanoscale circuits continue to shrink, electrical resistivity increases in the wiring and limits the maximum circuit speed. A new simulation program developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and George Washington University (GWU) can be used to predict such increases with greater input flexibility and model accuracy than other methods. The software program is expected to help the semiconductor industry design and test devices more efficiently and wi

You may think making a three-point turn in your car is easy, but how about doing the same with a single-charged atom?

That’s what scientists have achieved for the first time, marking a major breakthrough for physics and a first step towards creating the complicated labyrinth of ’atomic motorways’ needed for a quantum computer.

The microscopic motoring manoeuvre was performed by University of Sussex physicist Dr Winfried Hensinger with colleagues at the Uni

Nearly seven years after setting off in pursuit of comet Wild 2, the Stardust return capsule streaked across the night sky of the Western United States early Sunday, making a soft parachute landing in the Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City.

Special helicopter-borne teams secured and recovered the capsule, containing tens of thousands of comet grains and as many as 100 bits of interstellar dust, shortly after it landed. The capsule was moved to a clean room at the Air Forc

Marotta UK Ltd is pleased to announce that it has designed, developed and qualified equipment for the cold gas propulsion systems on board the Galileo GIOVE-A, part of Europe’s Galileo navigation program, successfully launched by Surrey Satellite Technology, Ltd (SSTL).

The launch of the Galileo GIOVE-A, the first in a constellation of 30 satellites, marks Europe’s maiden entry into civilian-owned global positioning systems. The complete Galileo constellation (27 operational and 3 acti

For a robot to identify objects in a particular image, it is first necessary that it can “see” them. With this aim, in artificial vision, edge detectors are normally used, i.e. computer programmes that delimit the objects in an image and define the limits between them and the background, and between the different objects themselves. Edurne Barrenechea Tartas from Pamplona has designed one of these edge detectors and, after trials with a wide-ranging set of photographs, she has shown that the re

Traditionally, research works related to quality in telecommunication services have consisted of a series of analysis over a set of critical-to-quality technical parameters and a resulting enhancement proposal. However, in this Phd. Thesis we aim to face the quality issue from an overall point of view: Not only analysing the objective performance of those agents involved in service provision but also by trying to assess which is their effect in final users’ satisfaction, since this must be the fi

The University of Manchester is to launch a new £40m world-class research institute, which will pioneer cutting-edge light and laser technologies.

The Photon Science Institute (PSI), which will be launched on January 18, with support from the Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA), will be the largest research and teaching centre of its kind in the UK with a projected annual research income of £5m and more than 30 full-time academic staff.

Photon Science – ‘light f

Computers and the Internet have been billed as enabling new ways of doing business, but in the residential real estate industry, people’s expanded access to information hasn’t rendered the real estate agent a relic, says a Penn State researcher. “The expectation was that real estate agents would go away once consumers could see all the home listing information, but the number of real estate agents has increased, not decreased, in the last 10 years,” says Steve Sawyer, associate pro

One year ago this week, on 14 January 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe reached the upper layer of Titan’s atmosphere and landed on the surface after a parachute descent 2 hours and 28 minutes later.

As part of the joint NASA/ESA/ASI mission to Saturn and its moons, the Huygens probe was sent from the Cassini spacecraft to explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan’s organic chemistry may be like that of the primitive Earth around 4000 million years ago, and may hold clues about how

With the exception of lasers and free-electron lasers, there hasn’t been another fundamental way to produce coherent light for close to 50 years.

But a group of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a new source of coherent optical radiation that is distinct from lasers and free-electron lasers.

Applications for this research are numerous, but the most immediate result may be a new diagnostic tool t

New evidence that VIRGOHI 21, a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth, is a Dark Galaxy, emitting no star light, was presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D. C. by an international team led by astronomers from the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory and from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. Their results not only indicate the presence of a dark galaxy but also explain the long-standing mys