Scientists will announce next month a new technique called microdisplacement printing, which makes possible the highly precise placement of molecules during the fabrication of nanoscale components for electronic and sensing devices. The new technique, which also extends the library of molecules that can be used for patterning, will be described in the 14 September issue of the journal Nano Letters by a team led by Paul S. Weiss, professor of chemistry and physics at Penn State.

On 5 August 2005, the ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft achieved an incredible milestone – the discovery of its 1000th comet!

The 1000th comet was a Kreutz-group comet spotted in images from the C3 coronagraph on SOHO’s LASCO instrument by Toni Scarmato, from Calabria, Italy. Just five minutes prior to discovering SOHO’s 1000th comet, Toni had also spotted SOHO’s 999th comet! These comets take Toni’s personal number of SOHO discoveries to 15.

Many SOHO comet

A recent EU project designed and developed a new demonstrator microchip that will dramatically cut the cost of producing new wireless products and could mean that a whole range of existing products will be enabled for wireless communication.

The IST-funded IMPACT project included industry heavyweights Ericsson and Philips who worked together to develop a new CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) chip that can transmit and receive microwave signals in the 5–24 GHz frequency

An ancient shellfish not seen for 425 million years is recreated in vivid 3D images published today, following a unique fossil find in the UK.

The ’articulate brachiopod’ fossil, found in a quarry in Herefordshire, England, is the first of its kind to be preserved with its soft parts intact in 3D. It was discovered by Dr Mark Sutton of Imperial College London, who reveals the structure of the clam-like organism using a 3D colour computer model in this week’s Natu

Engineers at Purdue University have created a nanotech simulation tool that shows how current flows between silicon atoms and individual molecules to help researchers design “molecular electronic” devices for future computers and advanced sensors.

Molecular electronics could make it possible to manufacture hardware by “growing” circuits and devices in layers that may “self-assemble,” similar to the growth of structures in living organisms. Devices for a variety of applicati

Data from the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft indicate that Saturn’s majestic ring system has its own atmosphere – separate from that of the planet itself.

During its close fly-bys of the ring system, instruments on Cassini have been able to determine that the environment around the rings is like an atmosphere, composed principally of molecular oxygen. This atmosphere is very similar to that of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede.

The finding was made by two

Recent Chandra observations have revealed new details about the fiery ring surrounding the stellar explosion that produced Supernova 1987A. The data give insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years before it exploded, and indicate that the predicted spectacular brightening of the circumstellar ring has begun.

The supernova occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy only 160,000 light years from Earth. The outburst was visible to the naked eye, and is the bright

Working at the Armagh Observatory with Dr Simon Jeffery and Dr Tolis Christou, Nuffield Science Bursary scholar Elizabeth Connolly was using an internet connection to control the Faulkes Telescope in Hawaii. During her half-hour observing session, she briefly turned the telescope to where the new planet had been discovered. After taking a photograph with the 2-metre telescope, she compared the new image with an old image of the same patch of sky. The new planet was clearly visible as a faint s

With the help of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have conducted the most comprehensive structural analysis of our galaxy and have found tantalizing new evidence that the Milky Way is much different from your ordinary spiral galaxy.

The survey using the orbiting infrared telescope provides the fine details of a long central bar feature that distinguishes the Milky Way from more pedestrian spiral galaxies.

“This is the best evidence ever for this long

Scientists at CERN announced the completion of the target assembly for the CERN neutrinos to Gran Sasso project, CNGS. On schedule for start-up in May 2006, CNGS will send a beam of neutrinos through the Earth to the Gran Sasso laboratory 730km away in Italy in a bid to unravel the mysteries of nature’s most elusive particles.

CNGS forms a unique element in the global effort to understand neutrinos, the chameleons of the fundamental particle world. Neutrinos come in three types, or flavou

Physicists in Singapore have succeeded in creating the first paper battery that generates electricity from urine. This new battery will be the perfect power source for cheap, disposable healthcare test-kits for diseases such as diabetes. This research is published today in the Institute of Physics’ Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Scientists in research groups around the world are trying to design ever smaller “biochips” that can test for a variety of diseases at once

Acceleration and quantum entanglement

Consider that Alice and Bob are two observers at rest separated by a long distance. Each of them has a measuring device that detects, respectively, two different quantum systems. The state of the joint system is said to be maximally entangled if, for many copies of the state, any measurement that Alice makes is completely determined by Bob’s and vice versa.

What would happen to their entanglement if Alice fell into a black ho

APL-Built Spectrometer on NASA’s Latest Mission to the Red Planet

With today’s launch of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars – or CRISM – joins the set of high-tech detectives seeking traces of water on the red planet.

Built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., CRISM is the first visible-infrared spectrometer to fly

Researchers at UCSD and Clemson University have discovered that specially synthesized carbon nanotube structures exhibit electronic properties that are improved over conventional transistors used in computers. In a paper published* in the September issue of Nature Materials and released online on August 14, UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professors Prabhakar Bandaru and Sungho Jin, graduate student Chiara Daraio, and Clemson physicist Apparao M. Rao reported that Y-shaped nanotubes beh

Astronomers from the universities of Hertfordshire and Kent have received a grant which will allow them to map large areas of the sky 1000 times faster than with current technology.

The universities, in conjunction with the University of British Columbia and the Joint Astronomy Centre, have been awarded 1,500 hours of observation and survey time on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. The award, which is part of the JCMT Major Legac

New work by two researchers at HP Laboratories Bristol sets out to solve one of the major difficulties in quantum computer architectures that use directly interacting qubits.

The problem is that the million-or-so qubits necessary to do useful calculations in a quantum computer would all feel the presence of each other, meaning that the information would leak in an uncontrollable way. The more qubits that are put together this way, the harder it is to control them.

The