A secure, semantic-based interoperability framework for exploiting Web service platforms across peer-to-peer networks in the tourism industry hopes to set free the valuable Web-based tourism information that is currently trapped in isolated silos of incompatible databases.

“The tourism industry today is the second largest economic sector, after manufacturing, in the world,” says Professor Asuman Dogac, Director of the Software Research & Development Center in Turkey, and coordinator

Stellar occultation allows VLT to determine Charon’s size and to put upper limit on its atmosphere

Observing a very rare occultation of a star by Pluto’s satellite Charon from three different sites, including Paranal, home of the VLT, astronomers were able to determine with great accuracy the radius and density of the satellite to the farthest planet. The density, 1.71 that of water, is indicative of an icy body with about slightly more than half of rocks. The observati

Physicists capture small numbers of atoms in laser traps

Like bakers measuring the exact same amount of flour every time they made bread, physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have used a laser trap to consistently capture and measure the same small number of atoms.

Dr. Mark Raizen, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair in Physics, and his colleagues at the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics have been able to repeatedly capture as few as sixty atoms in a box made

Modern health information systems today are proprietary and often only serve one department making it impossible to easily share data across one facility, never mind across different facilities or countries. A big problem, it makes it difficult for doctors to capture a complete clinical history of a patient. But one project hopes to overcome this.

“The healthcare interoperability problem can be investigated in two categories: Interoperability of the healthcare messages exchanged

Donald Brownlee’s heart skipped a beat six years ago when the launch of the Stardust spacecraft didn’t happen as planned. The University of Washington astronomy professor has experienced many other tense times since the historic mission blasted off a day late, and its return to Earth on Jan. 15 will be just one more white-knuckle moment.

Just before 3 a.m. MST, the spacecraft will jettison its return capsule, which will plunge into Earth’s atmosphere at nea

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s long heritage with NASA planetary missions will continue Jan. 17 with the launch of a student space dust instrument on the New Horizons Mission to Pluto from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

As the first student-built instrument ever selected by the space agency to fly on a planetary mission, the CU-Boulder Student Dust Counter, or SDC, will monitor the density of dust grains in space as New Horizons buzzes to Pluto and beyond.

In an unusual observation, a team of scientists has scanned the northern polar region of Earth with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The results show that the aurora borealis, or “northern lights,” also dance in X-ray light, creating changing bright arcs of X-ray energy above the Earth’s surface.

While other satellite observations had previously detected high-energy X-rays from the Earth auroras, the latest Chandra observations reveal low-energy X-rays generated for the fir

First air-breathing, liquid fuel-powered scramjet takes flight

Before the sun had even risen over Wallops Island, Va., on 10 December 2005, a joint Office of Naval Research/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency vehicle achieved a world first. At an altitude of 63,000 feet, the Freeflight Atmospheric Scramjet Test Technique (FASTT) vehicle became the first air-breathing, liquid hydrocarbon fuel-powered scramjet engine to fly.

After launching from the NASA Wallops Fligh

A single unifying physics theory can essentially describe how animals of every ilk, from flying insects to fish, get around, researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and Pennsylvania State University have found. The team reports that all animals bear the same stamp of physics in their design.

The researchers show that so-called “constructal theory” can explain basic characteristics of locomotion for every creature — how fast they get from one place to anoth

Two Stunning Pictures of Young Stellar Clusters

Just like Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol takes us on a journey into past, present and future in the time of only one Christmas Eve, two of ESO’s telescopes captured various stages in the life of a star in a single image.

ESO PR Photo 42a/05 shows the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis (“The Stern”). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a

The segmentation techniques of the Technology Centre for Information Studies at Bremen University and the University Clinic, Würzburg allow the visualisation…

Scientists of University of Bremen are developing a dew point detector of just a few millimetres of size.

The detector features a tiny membrane, where water…

The EUREKA ITEA Cluster TT-Medal project has achieved a major breakthrough for the European electronics industry by developing a generic solution to enable automated testing of software systems. The methodologies and tools developed in the project were validated in industrial-scale demonstrators for automotive, railway, financial and telecommunications applications, proving the feasibility of a significant improvement in test efficiency, effectiveness and product quality, leading to significan

Mathematical research at Delft University of Technology is making it easier to look for oil. Yogi Ahmad Erlangga, who receives his doctorate on Thursday 22 December, has developed a method of calculation which enables computers to solve a crucial equation much faster. In the past, this stumped oil company computers.

Funded by Shell and SenterNovem, Erlangga’s research is pure mathematics. It all centres on the so-called Helmholtz equation. Solving this is important in interpreting the

ESO Awards Important Contract for the ALMA Project

Only two weeks after awarding its largest-ever contract for the procurement of antennas for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array project (ALMA), ESO has signed a contract with Scheuerle Fahrzeugfabrik GmbH, a world-leader in the design and production of custom-built heavy-duty transporters, for the provision of two antenna transporting vehicles. These vehicles are of crucial importance for ALMA.

‘The timely awarding of

ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft has been surveying the Moon’s surface in visible and near-infrared light using a new technique, never before tried in lunar orbit.

For the last few months, the Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE) on board SMART-1, has been opening new ground by attempting multi-spectral imaging in the ‘push-broom’ mode. This technique is particularly suited to colour imaging of the lunar surface. (Note that ‘colour imaging’ here does not mean natural colour, the colour ba