White dwarfs are important to theories of both stellar and cosmological evolution. New results published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society provide for the first time an accurate measurement of the weight of the nearest white dwarf, Sirius B, companion of the brightest star in the sky. It turns out that Sirius’s companion, despite being smaller than the Earth, has a mass that is 98% that of our own Sun.

For astronomers, it’s always been a source of frustratio

ESA has confirmed the principle of a new space thruster that may ultimately give much more thrust than today’s electric propulsion techniques. The concept is an ingenious one, inspired by the northern and southern aurorae, the glows in the sky that signal increased solar activity.

“Essentially the concept exploits a natural phenomenon we see taking place in space,” says Dr Roger Walker of ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team. “When the solar wind, a ‘plasma’ of electrified gas released by

Clues revealed by the recently sharpened view of the Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to map the location of invisible “dark matter” in unprecedented detail in two very young galaxy clusters.

A Johns Hopkins University-Space Telescope Science Institute team reports its findings in the December issue of Astrophysical Journal. (Other, less-detailed observations appeared in the January 2005 issue of that publication.)

The team’s results lend credence to

Physicists propose innovative probe for quantum criticalities

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists from Rice University is preparing a unique probe in hopes of “dialing in” elusive quantum states called “quantum criticalities.” The team is using nanotechnology to create a probe capable of trapping and tuning a single electron to create the rarified physical state in nearby magnetic electrodes.

The probe, a transistor thousands of times smaller than a living

Picture a teaspoon of powdered sugar. As fine a substance as it is, there still are tremendous differences in the sizes of its individual particles. Some are so small, they move around randomly and are invisible to the naked eye.

Now, let’s say you wanted to choose only particles of a certain size from those in the spoon. Traditional technology and scientific techniques can separate quantities of particles of different sizes down to a few microns, but beyond that, it’s no

In conventional dual-mode circuitry both signal lines are just switched by the PIN-diodes. The novel dual-mode switches, which were developed in the department…

International research team reports on the Earth-like surface of Saturn’s moon Titan

Conditions on Saturn’s moon Titan, with its dense atmosphere, are similar to those on Earth early in our solar system. Pictures and spectral analysis of Titan’s surface, recorded by an international scientific team including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), show a dried-out “river” landscape. Evaluating the data has now shown that methane on

ESO, the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere, announced today that it has signed a contract with the consortium led by Alcatel Alenia Space and composed also of European Industrial Engineering (Italy) and MT Aerospace (Germany), to supply 25 antennas for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) project, along with an option for another seven antennas. The contract, worth 147 million euros, covers the design, manufacture, transport and on-site integration of

Create powerful statistical techniques to detect signals

A Case Western Reserve University research team from physics and statistics has recently created innovative statistical techniques that improve the chances of detecting a signal in large data sets. The new techniques can not only search for the “needle in the haystack” in particle physics, but also have applications in discovering a new galaxy, monitoring transactions for fraud and security risk, identifying the carrier

University of Chicago physicists have created a novel state of matter using nothing more than a container of loosely packed sand and a falling marble. They have found that the impacting marble produces a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid.

“We’re discovering a new type of fluid state that seems to exist in this combination of gas–air in this case–and a dense arrangement of particles,” said Heinrich Jaeger, Professor in Physics and Di

More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a Yale astronomer in a study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted.

The idea of large galaxies being assembled primarily by mergers rather than evolving by themselves in isolation has grown to dominate cosmological thinking. However, a troubling inconsistency within this general theory has

Jets of fine, icy particles streaming from Saturn’s moon Enceladus were captured in recent images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The images provide unambiguous visual evidence the moon is geologically active.

“For planetary explorers like us, there is little that can compare to the sighting of activity on another solar system body,” said Dr. Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “This has been a heart-stopper, and surely one

Quantum memory

A series of publications in the journal Nature highlights the race among competing research groups toward the long-anticipated goal of quantum networking.

In one of three papers published the journal’s December 8 issue, a group of physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Professors Alex Kuzmich and Brian Kennedy describes the storage and retrieval of single photons transmitted between remote quantum memories composed of rubidium atoms

DEISA, the European supercomputing grid infrastructure, and TeraGrid, the US supercomputing cyberinfrastructure, and have been linked, for the purposes of a technology demonstration, by a common, scalable, wide-area global file system spanning two continents.

The bridging of communities in the old and the new world were showcased during the Supercomputing Conference SC05 at Seattle. It was shown that any scientist, accessing TeraGrid from any of the participating sites in the U

New Version of SSML to include Internationalization features; VoiceXML 3.0 to incorporate Speaker verification

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced new work on extensions to components of the Speech Interface Framework which will both extend Speech Synthesis Markup Language functionality to Asian and other languages, and include speaker verification features into the next version of VoiceXML, version 3.0. Addressing both areas expands both the reach and functionality

UK scientists are returning to Mars with the news that the UK is to be a major player in the first phase of the European Space Agency’s robotic space exploration programme – Aurora – which will set the agenda for Europe’s robotic exploration of space for the next 10 years. The announcement was made at the conclusion of ESA’s Ministerial Meeting held in Berlin (5-6 December).

The UK is to invest 108.1 million Euros (approximately £74.4 million) into Aurora, making the UK second la