Mobile phones could one day have the memory capacity of a desktop computer thanks to a microchip that mimics the functioning of the brain, scientists report today (9 September) in the journal Science.

Researchers from Imperial College London, Durham University and the University of Sheffield say their new computer chip design will enable large amounts of data to be stored in small volumes by using a complex interconnected network of nanowires, with computing functions and decisions

A breakthrough by a team of British, US and French scientists will help protect astronauts, spacecraft and satellites from radiation hazards experienced in space.

Reporting in the journal Nature this week, the team describe how their study of rare and unusual space storms provided a unique opportunity to test conflicting theories about the behaviour of high energy particles in the Van Allen radiation belts* – a volatile region 12000 miles (19,000 km) above the Earth.

SSETI Express, a low Earth orbit spacecraft designed and built by European university students under the supervision of ESA’s Education Department, is to be launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on a Russian Cosmos 3M launcher on 27 September in the morning.

On that occasion, ESA will be organising a launch event at Space Expo, the public visitors’ centre close to ESA/ESTEC at Noordwijk in the Netherlands. A live televised transmission of the launch will bring images from Plesetsk a

Rice scientists replace pricey solvents with cheap processing fluids

In an important advance toward the large-scale manufacture of fluorescent quantum dots, scientists at Rice University have developed a new method of replacing the pricey solvents used in quantum dot synthesis with cheaper oils that are commonplace at industrial chemical plants.

Rice’s study, which was conducted under the auspices of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN)

’Light breaks where no sun shines’

Astronomers looking for earth-like planets in other solar systems — exoplanets — now have a new field guide thanks to earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis.

Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Schaefer, laboratory assistant, have used thermochemical equilibrium calculations to model the chemistry of silicate vapor a

Scientists have developed a new ultra-light limb that can mimic the movement in a real hand better than any currently available. This research was presented today at the Institute of Physics conference Sensors and their Applications XIII which took place at the University of Greenwich, Kent, UK.

Every year 200 people in the UK lose their hands. Common causes include motorbike accidents and industrial incidents. Currently available prosthetic hands are either simple mimics that l

Chemical proof for two wet scenarios

A large team of NASA scientists, led by earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis details the first solid set of evidence for water having existed on Mars at the Gusev crater, exploration site of the rover Spirit.

Using an array of sophisticated equipment on Spirit, Alian Wang, Ph.D., Washington University senior research scientist in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and the late Larry A. Hask

Missions of interest include Saturn’s Titan

For the last two years, tests have been conducted at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility to see how materials used for NASA’s future planetary exploration missions can withstand severe radiant heating.

The tests apply heat equivalent to 1,500 suns to spacecraft shields called Advanced Charring Ablators. The ablators protect spacecraft entering atmospheres at hypersonic speeds.

Ohio State University researchers have just completed the first comprehensive study of human hair on the nanometer level.

Special equipment enabled Bharat Bhushan and his colleagues to get an unprecedented close-up look at a rogue’s gallery of bad hair days – from chemically overprocessed locks to curls kinked up by humidity.

They used the techniques they developed to test a new high-tech hair conditioner.

Ultimately, the same techniques could be used to

Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have the universe’s coldest substance running in circles.

The UC Berkeley team has created a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms and nudged it into a circular racetrack 2 millimeters across, creating a particle storage ring analogous to the accelerator storage rings of high energy physics. This ring, the first to contain a Bose-Einstein gas, is full of cold particles at a temperature of only one-millionth of a deg

Concerns over the privacy of patients could be hampering efforts to spot disease clusters and monitor the health effects of environmental pollution, according to researchers in the latest edition of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Data made available to research groups investigating everything from cancer clusters to the risk of living near to hazardous waste sites is often restricted, altered or aggregated in order to protect the identity of individual patients.

A major breakthrough in the use of molecules as information processors is to be announced at this year’s BA Festival of Science in Dublin.

Nanotechnology experts are exploring the capabilities of molecules that act like conventional computers but can operate in tiny places where no silicon-based chip or semiconductor can go. Now, for the first time, they have used these molecules to perform logic operations and process information in spaces a few nanometres across.

eDevice of France has developed IDeMS, a completely new gateway for M2M fleet management that is accessible via a standard internet browser. It uses eDevice M2M modules to manage a fleet of systems connected via TCP/IP. IDeMS (Intelligent Device Management System) network and fleet-management services provide an immediately operational turnkey solution to maintain, supervise and run a complete M2M fleet.

The IDeMS fleet-management service can be used to recover, consolidate, archive and

EXPWAY of France has launched FastEPG™ v1.5, an enhanced multi-media Electronic Program Guide (EPG). It is an application that can be used with digital video recorders, set-top boxes, and the latest TV sets. Viewers can use EPG to find, book, view and review content; it will also be an essential differentiator element for operators, helping them to strengthen their brand. EXPWAY will be showcasing its technology at the IBC trade show in Amsterdam in early September 2005.

As the main

New observations from the Cassini spacecraft now at Saturn indicate the particles comprising one of its most prominent rings are trapped in ever-changing clusters of debris that are regularly torn apart and reassembled by gravitational forces from the planet.

According to University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Larry Esposito of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, particle clusters in the outermost main ring, the A ring, range from the size of sedans to movin

ESA’s Integral space observatory, together with NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer spacecraft, has found a fast-spinning pulsar in the process of devouring its companion.

This finding supports the theory that the fastest-spinning isolated pulsars get that fast by cannibalising a nearby star. Gas ripped from the companion fuels the pulsar’s acceleration. This is the sixth pulsar known in such an arrangement, and it represents a ’stepping stone’ in the evol