Late last evening local time an Ariane 5 ECA launcher lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on its mission to place two satellites into geostationary transfer orbit . Liftoff took place at 20:46 in French Guiana (00:46 CET).

The 50.5-metre tall launcher was carrying the Spaceway 2 telecommunication satellite for the American operator DIRECTV and the Telkom 2 telecommunication satellite for the Indonesian operator PT. Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk. With a mass of over 6100 kg,

Vibrations of magnetization have for the first time been captured on camera by scientists at The University of Manchester revealing a rainbow of colours.

For the first time, images of induced magnetic pulsations at the frequency of visible light have been captured – as reported in Nature (17 November, 2005).

The colours are produced when a new type of material, created by the research team, is exposed to light. The magnetic vibrations induced in the material are so strong t

Today the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) opens a new high-throughput crystallization facility at its Outstation located on the campus of the German Synchrotron Radiation Facility (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. The facility, made possible by major funds from the German Ministry for Science and Education (BMBF), will combine technological advances in new ways to transform proteins into crystals, a key step in efforts to automate the process of analyzing protein structures. “We’re very

Latest study shows surprising variations in individual nanotube efficiency

Nanotubes are the poster children of the nanotechnology revolution. These tiny carbon tubes – less than 1/50,000 the diameter of a human hair – possess novel properties that have researchers excitedly exploring dozens of potential applications ranging from transistors to space elevators.

Nanotubes also produce light with a number of interesting properties, which have led researchers to propose

Unprecedented nonlinear optical efficiency could make small organic molecules useful for optical computing, data processing and telecommunication

Researchers from Lehigh University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) have reported unprecedented nonlinear optical efficiency in some small organic molecules that makes the molecules potentially useful for optical computing, optical data processing, and optical telecommunication.

In an article to

Ohio State University researchers have invented a new organic polymer tunnel diode – an electronic component that could one day lead to plastic computer memory and plastic logic circuits on computer chips. Today, computer chips use mainly inorganic silicon.

The diode transmits electrical current at room temperature, and its design lends itself to easy, inexpensive manufacturing for smart cards and other memory devices, said Paul Berger, a professor of electrical and computer engineer

Optical and structural properties of PbS nanoparticles produced in Zeolite Na-X

The study of semiconductor nanoparticles embedded in a matrix is currently a very active research area. These small particles have physicochemical properties quite different from those in the bulk material. A great variety of semiconductors nanoparticles have been synthesized in different matrix such as polymers, glasses and zeolites with the main purpose to modify their properties by controll

A new computer model indicates Jupiter’s massive winds are generated from deep within the giant planet’s interior, a UCLA scientist and international colleagues report today in the journal Nature.

Jupiter’s powerful winds are very different from those on Earth. They continually circle the planet, and have changed very little in the 300 years that scientists have studied them. Massive east-west winds in Jupiter’s equatorial region reach approximately 340 miles p

A Stanford University research team has designed the first microscope sensitive enough to track the real-time motion of a single protein down to the level of its individual atoms. Writing in the Nov. 13 online issue of the journal Nature, the Stanford researchers explain how the new instrument allowed them to settle long-standing scientific debates about the way genes are copied from DNA–a biochemical process that’s essential to life.

In a second paper published in the No

We are close to the point where new types of automated routines and software applications could operate independently of direct human control to carry out prescribed tasks. Helping us arrive, researchers have designed a model that supports the development of applications constructed from mobile sentient objects.

Firstly though, developers need to overcome the shortcomings of current architectures and middleware, which are still largely based on sequential programming models. T

Highlight during SC|05 in Seattle: Fraunhofer Visualization Software on an IBM Cell Cluster Prototyp.

One highlight of the International Conference on High Performance Computing SC|05 in Seattle will be the visualization software PV-4D of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM. The software has been installed on a prototype of an IBM cell blade cluster and will be presented to a large public for the first time. A successful test run was performed during the Frau

Astronomers from British and German universities have made a new discovery which could provide evidence for a previously unknown supermassive black hole millions of times heavier than the sun.

The team from the Centre for Astrophysics Research at the University of Hertfordshire and at the Dr Remeis-Sternwarte at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg/D have discovered a short-lived massive star, named HE 0437-5439, that is moving at a very high speed through the outer halo of t

One of the world’s largest optical telescopes, the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), in which the Armagh Observatory has a share, was officially unveiled today by the South African President Thabo Mbeki in Sutherland, a small town in the Northern Cape Province, South Africa. Also known as Africa’s Giant Eye, SALT (www.salt.ac.za) is a new ground-breaking project which will enable astronomers from six countries, including the UK, to study more closely the lives of stars and the origins of

A unique observatory in a remote location in Argentina is starting to unravel the mysteries of High Energy Cosmic Rays. There is no scientific consensus on the source of these particles which the shower the Earth at energies 10 million times higher than can be produced in particle accelerators! But the Pierre Auger Observatory is shedding new light on these energetic particles from space and using them as messengers to tell us more about the wider Universe.

Scientists of the

New research shows that the unique properties of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates extend to the internal spin states of the atoms from which the condensates are formed. Bose-Einstein condensates are an unusual form of matter in which all atoms exist in the same quantum state.

Beyond fundamental physics interest, the work could provide a foundation for future research with potential implications for quantum information systems.

Bose-Einstein condensates are formed by

By watching a distant star as it passed behind Saturn’s outer rings, Cornell University astronomers on NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn have found the most direct evidence to date of patterns, called gravitational wakes, within the planet’s outer rings.

The patterns, thin, parallel striations like spokes on a pinwheel, have been theorized since the 1970s, but their small scale (just 100 meters — 328 feet — wide) makes them impossible to see even with the spacecraft’s hig