Project looked at massive mobile launch platform, shuttle transporter

Sandia National Laboratories recently conducted a series of tests to help NASA understand the fatigue on the space shuttle caused during rollout from the Kennedy Space Center assembly building to the launch pad – a four-mile trip.

The tests are part of NASA’s return-to-flight mission, with the first flight scheduled between May 15 and June 3.

Sandia, a National Nuclear Security Admi

Imagine a computer system that can automatically search through videos of football matches and pull out all the shots on goal or all the fouls.

Creating the elements that make such a system possible is a key result from the IST BUSMAN project. The current generation of computer systems is excellent at searching for and manipulating text: as the spectacular success of Google has shown. However, computers are now routinely used to store and process more than just text – videos of

About 450,000 children spread among 2,700 public school districts in 25 states all have something in common: They’ve used educational Fast ForWord software products developed from research that began in the lab of Rutgers-Newark professor of neuroscience Paula Tallal.

Working at Rutgers-Newark’s Center for Molecular and Biological Neuroscience, she has brought a neuroscientist’s perspective to the concept of learning, convinced that developing brains are much more plastic than has

New state of matter more remarkable than predicted — raising many new questions

The four detector groups conducting research at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — a giant atom “smasher” located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — say they’ve created a new state of hot, dense matter out of the quarks and gluons that are the basic particles of atomic nuclei, but it is a state quite different and even more remarkable than had been predi

A fundamental number that affects the color of light emitted by atoms as well as all chemical interactions has not changed in more than 7 billion years, according to observations by a team of astronomers charting the evolution of galaxies and the universe.

The results are being reported today (Monday, April 18) at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) by astronomer Jeffrey Newman, a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory representing DEEP2, a

Tom Cowan’s team cultivating new laser technology for more precise cancer treatments

Tom Cowan’s team is thinking smaller, but with big impact. Particle accelerators are a key research tool in a high energy physicist’s arsenal, but they take up a lot of space – miles and miles of it. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, smaller is better.

Cowan, director of the Nevada Terawatt Facility at the University, and his research partners have produced a proton

ESA’s SMART-1 mission to the Moon has been monitoring the illumination of lunar poles since the beginning of 2005, about two months before arriving at its final science orbit.

Ever since, the AMIE on-board camera has been taking images which are even able to show polar areas in low illumination conditions. Images like these will help identify if peaks of eternal light exist at the poles.

SMART-1 took views of the North Polar Region from a distance of 5000 km during a paus

The beginnings of precious metals like gold can be traced to the blink of an eye in an exploding star billions of years ago, and scientists at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL) at Michigan State University have been able to scrutinize a crucial step in that process.

By reproducing the processes inside supernovas in a laboratory, scientists have resurrected an isotope of nickel – one that no longer exists in nature, but is an important link in the birth of t

Duke University theoreticians said their predictions helped guide the efforts of experimenters using Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) atom smasher to create an almost perfectly flowing fluid of hot, dense matter.

Duke physics professor Berndt Mueller and assistant physics professor Steffen A. Bass said that some of the experimental evidence would also support the idea that these collisions have recreated a state of matter — a quark-glu

One of the hallmarks of quantum mechanics — the laws of physics that apply on very small scales — is the wave nature exhibited by sub-atomic particles such as electrons. An electron presented with two paths to a destination will use its wave nature to traverse both paths and, depending on the parameters of the two paths, will constructively or destructively interfere with itself at its destination, leading to a high or low probability of it appearing there.

A classic demonstration of th

University of California scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory working with astronomers from around the world recently validated a computer model that predicts the rebirth and stellar burning and mixing processes of evolved stars. The discovery is a leap forward in our understanding of how stars like the sun evolve through violent outbursts during their evolution.

In research published recently in the journal Science, Laboratory astrophysicist Falk Herwig and his colleag

A primitive star with extremely low iron content has been discovered by an international research team from Sweden, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia and Great Britain. The results are published in Nature online this week.

In 2001, the giant star HE0107-5240 was discovered among a large number of stars examined as part of the Hamburg/ESO* survey. Detailed studies revealed that the star had by far the lowest iron content ever recorded – 200 000 times lower than the Sun. Previously,

Road warriors may no longer have to stay put in an airport lounge or Starbucks to access the high-speed Internet via an 802.11 Wi-Fi network. Thanks to software developed by two computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, the time it takes to hand off from one Wi-Fi wireless network to the next can be dramatically shortened — overcoming a major obstacle in Wi-Fi roaming.

Jacobs School of Engineering professor Stefan Savage and graduate student Ishwar Ramani h

The concept of time is self-evident. An hour consists of a certain number of minutes, a day of hours and a year of days. But we rarely think about the fundamental nature of time.

Time is passing non-stop, and we follow it with clocks and calendars. Yet we cannot study it with a microscope or experiment with it. And it still keeps passing. We just cannot say what exactly happens when time passes.

Time is represented through change, such as the circular motion of the moon

Except for the fact that we call it home, for centuries astronomers didn’t have any particular reason to believe that our solar system was anything special in the universe. But, beginning with the discovery 10 years ago of the first planet outside our solar system, evidence suggests that, as far as planetary systems go, the solar system might be special indeed.

Instead of the nice circular orbits our nine planets enjoy, most of the more than 160 extrasolar planets detected in

Contrary to established scientific thinking, you’d be roasted and not “spaghettified” if you stumbled into a supermassive black hole. New research being presented at the Institute of Physics conference Physics 2005 in Warwick will take a new look at the diet of the universe’s most intriguing object, black holes.

Black holes stand at the very edge of scientific theory. Most scientists believe they exist, although many of their theories break down under the extreme condi