When runners begin the marathon at the Athletic World Championships in Helsinki this August, they will have a high-tech edge, thanks to a Finnish start-up firm.

The race course has been recorded in detail and sent to competitors to help them prepare for the competition. The data was compiled by the FRWD Sport Performance Recorder, a strap-on gadget that measures race route, distance and speed using GPS technology, as well as an individual athlete’s heart rate, altitude and other

’Martian bread and green tomato jam’, ’Spirulina gnocchis’ and ’Potato and tomato mille-feuilles’ are three delicious recipes that two French companies have created for ESA and future space explorers to Mars and other planets.

The challenge for the chefs was to offer astronauts well-flavoured food, made with only a few ingredients that could be grown on Mars. The result was 11 tasty recipes that could be used on future ESA long-duration space missions. ADF – Alain Ducasse Forma

This is a ’media only’ event.

ESO Headquarters
Garching bei München, Germany
4-5 July 2005

Be where the action is! Share with all European cometary specialists the excitement at the time of the impact and see how they prepare and obtain the follow-up images and spectra

On July 4, 2005, the NASA Deep Impact spacecraft will visit Comet 9P/Tempel 1. It will launch a 360 kg impactor that is expected to produce a crater on the surface of the comet

The world’s preeminent planet hunters have discovered the most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet: a possibly rocky world about 7.5 times as massive as the Earth.

This hot “super-Earth,” just 15 light years away, travels in a nearly circular orbit only 2 million miles from its parent star, Gliese 876, and has a radius about twice that of Earth. All the nearly 150 extrasolar planets discovered to date that are orbiting normal stars have been larger than Uranus, an ice giant a

The traditional cry of “new balls please” at tennis courts throughout the country could become a thing of the past thanks to a new invention by a University of Bath student.

Aimée Cubitt, a final year Mechanical Engineering student, has developed a new device which pumps air into tennis balls to extend their useful life and restore the bounce of old balls.

This is useful because tennis balls start to lose their bounce as soon as they are removed from their container as t

Experts in the field of optical technology meet biennially at the “Laser – World of Photonics” in Munich. The Bonn research center caesar is exhibiting again at this year’s fair which will take place from 13 to 16 June. The research group “Holography and Laser Technology” headed by Prof. Peter Hering is presenting its state-of-the-art developments in Hall B2, Stand 252: an ultrafast holographic system featuring a mobile camera used for three-dimensional facial topometry for surgical planning and

New imaging technique—a trillion times faster than conventional techniques—advances field of plasmonics, could lead to better semiconductors

Both the ancient art of stained glass and the cutting-edge field of plasmonics rely on the oscillation of electrons in nanosized metal particles. When light shines on such particles, it excites the electromagnetic fields on the metal’s surface, known as “surface plasmons,” and causes its electrons to oscillate in waves–producing the

An international team of researchers, led by astronomers at the University of Pennsylvania, has launched the most highly sensitive telescope of its kind to be carried by balloon. The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope or BLAST will take a five to nine-day journey along the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. BLAST will collect images of objects in our solar system as well as the distant light that details the formation of stars and the evolution of whole galaxies.

A team of European and US scientists, using Cassini-Huygens data, have found that Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan may have volcanoes that release methane in the atmosphere.

These findings may lead scientists to revise the theories that the presence of methane in Titan’s atmosphere is mainly due to the presence of a methane-rich hydrocarbon ocean.

Infrared images taken by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board the Cassini orbiter, show a bright, 30-kilom

ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft has for the first time ever detected an aurora on Mars. This aurora is of a type never previously observed in the Solar System.

Observations by the SPICAM instrument (SPectroscopy for the Investigations and the Characteristics of the Atmosphere on Mars) taken on 11 August 2004, revealed light emissions now interpreted as an aurora.

Aurorae are spectacular displays often seen at the highest latitudes on Earth. On our planet, as well as on the

Astronomers Commission New High-Speed Camera on the Very Large Telescope

British scientists have opened a new window on the Universe with the recent commissioning of ULTRACAM on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

ULTRACAM is an ultra fast camera capable of capturing some of the most rapid astronomical events. It can take up to 500 pictures a second in three different colours simultaneously. It has been designed and built b

A University of Leicester team is involved in a newly-selected NASA mission to Jupiter due to be launched in 2010.

The mission, called Juno, will now proceed to preliminary design phase – it is the second in NASA’s New Frontiers Program.

The mission will conduct a first-time, in-depth study of the giant planet. The aim is to place a spacecraft in a polar orbit around Jupiter to investigate the existence of an ice-rock core; determine the amount of global water and a

Thanks to measurements by the D-CIXS X-ray spectrometer, ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft has made the first ever unambiguous remote-sensing detection of calcium on the Moon.

SMART-1 is currently performing the verification and calibration of its instruments, while it runs along its science orbit, reaching 450 kilometres from the Moon at its closest distance. During this calibration phase, which precedes the actual science observations phase, the SMART-1 scientists are getting acquaint

Imagine a stand at a motor show featuring a new convertible. There’s a screen ‘hanging in the air’ with everything you expect on your PC desktop. You can click your way through all the new features of the car just by pointing your finger, and when you’re done you can walk through the screen and on to the next stand.

Imagine an operating theatre, where a surgeon can access an imaging databank on his PC using a similar airborne screen, without having to touch any keys or worry about

A violent and chaotic-looking mass of gas and dust is seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby supernova remnant. Denoted N 63A, the object is the remains of a massive star that exploded, spewing its gaseous layers out into an already turbulent region.

The supernova remnant N 63A is a member of N 63, a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Visible from the southern hemisphere, the LMC is an irregular galaxy lying 160,000 light-years from our own Milky

Many people have dreamt at some point of being an astronaut and travelling through space but hardly any get the opportunity to fulfil these childhood dreams. If you are a scientist with an engineering, maths or physics background the University of Surrey (UniS) may be able to help you reach for the stars with its newly-launched MSc and BEng/MEng courses in Space Technology and Planetary Exploration. While UniS cannot promise to launch you into the cosmos, these new courses can at least launch your