A powerful, high-capacity chip currently under development has the potential to revolutionise daily life, doing away with many of the identity documents, credit cards and passwords people have to use each day.

Due to end in June, the IST programme-funded project SM-PAYSOC has so far created a working prototype of the chip packaged in a smartcard, which in the future could also be incorporated into a USB token or a SIM card.

It allows users to access services and carry

The MoonMars Habitat Student Design Workshop is underway at ESA/ESTEC – working in the inspiring setting of the Erasmus User Centre, the 30 participants have until the end of the week to study, discuss and design a Moon, Mars or other planetary habitat.

The 30 students selected come from 13 different countries and a broad range of background, including engineering, space science, architecture, ergonomics, medicine and psychology. They have been working since Sunday in the Erasmus

New Young Sub-stellar Companion Imaged with the VLT

Since the discovery in 1995 of the first planet orbiting a normal star other than the Sun, there are now more than 150 candidates of these so-called exoplanets known. Most of them are detected by indirect methods, based either on variations of the radial velocity or the dimming of the star as the planet passes in front of it (see ESO PR 06/03, ESO PR 11/04 and ESO PR 22/04).

Astronomers would, however, prefer to obtain a

European space scientists have strongly recommended a mission equipped with a rover as the next scientific mission to Mars as part of the European Space Agency’s [ESA] Aurora programme of planetary exploration. The mission would conduct a detailed analysis of the Martian environment and search for traces of past or present life. A launch in June 2011, followed by a two year journey, would arrive on the Red Planet in June 2013. A detailed proposal will be prepared for consideration by ESA member

Distant galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation have been shown by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to be fertile growing grounds for the largest black holes in the Universe. Collisions between galaxies in the early Universe may be the ultimate cause for both the accelerated star formation and black hole growth.

By combining the deepest X-ray image ever obtained with submillimeter and optical observations, an international team of scientists has found evidence that

It’s nature’s fastest quick-change artist: In less than the time it takes a beam of light to travel a tenth of a millimeter, vanadium dioxide can switch from a transparent to a reflective, mirror-like state.

How this material (VO2) can turn from a transparent insulator into a reflective metal so rapidly has physicists scratching their heads, but a collaboration among researchers at Vanderbilt, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have clocked the

Ares Research Technology, a new start-up company which will design and assemble scientific equipment that works at ultra-high vacuum, was launched today at CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory. The company will supply advanced instruments for use on X-ray sources in laboratories and at synchrotron light sources around the world.

Company founder Dr Dave Teehan said, “There’s a rapidly expanding global market for vacuum instruments, which already play a key role in research into the developm

For the last five years, a team of astronomers at the University of Cambridge and the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia, has been building a special instrument to search for the most distant galaxies in the Universe.

Known as DAZLE (Dark Age Redshift Lyman Explorer), the 21st century “time machine” will be able to look back 12,800 million years to the end of the Dark Ages, when the very first stars were appearing from the gloom that dominated the Universe shortly aft

The NASA-led Swift mission has measured the distance to two gamma-ray bursts — back to back, from opposite parts of the sky — and both were from over nine billion light years away, unleashed billions of years before the Sun and Earth formed.

These achievements are the mission’s first direct distance, or redshift, measurements, its latest milestone since the Swift satellite’s launch in November 2004. The distances were attained with Swift’s Ultraviolet/OpticalTelesco

“Our plan is to have ‘the’ operating system for buildings.” So says Richard Green, CEO of the newly-established Cambridge (UK) start-up Ubisense, about his company’s revolutionary new technology for locating staff within the workspace environment.

Green is one of the five entrepreneurs who founded the company in May 2002, and who have since seen their company more than double in size and rapidly establish a client-base in Europe, the US and the Far East. “Basically, Ubisense make

An EU computer science project hopes to make the uncertainty attached to the pervasive computing future a lot more secure through establishing trust.

Using the cost-benefit function at the heart of risk analysis, the IST programme-funded SECURE project developed software to integrate the very subjective, human concept of trust into computers, PDAs, mobile ’phones and other network devices.

Pervasive computing is a steadily emerging reality. Mobile phones and PDAs ar

Co-workers sharing digital music in the workplace via Apple Computer’s popular iTunes® software form impressions of each other based on their musical libraries, according to a new study by human-computer interaction researchers.

Employees in a mid-sized U.S. company reported that they consciously worked to portray themselves in certain ways through the collections of music they shared with co-workers, some of whom they barely knew. Sometimes their self-portrayals were misread by

Barely visible dust layer in the place of explosion would tell specialists where and when the explosive was produced. To this end, the dust should be preliminarily marked up in the way suggested by Russian researchers. The project was sponsored by the International Science and Technology Center.

When investigating the locus delicti after the explosion the experts face a significant problem. They can determine with high probability the kind and capacity of explosive device used

A UK-led team of astronomers has discovered a completely new type of star cluster around a neighbouring galaxy.

The new-found clusters contain hundreds of thousands of stars, a similar number to the so-called “globular” star clusters which have long been familiar to astronomers.

What distinguishes them from the globular clusters is that they are much larger – several hundred light years across – and hundreds of times less dense. The distances between the stars are, there

Achievement could benefit fields of superchemistry, quantum computing

A research team that in 2003 created an exotic new form of matter has now shown for the first time how to arrange that matter into complex molecules.

The experiments–conducted by Cheng Chin, now at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues under the leadership of Rudolf Grimm at Innsbruck University in Austria–may lead to a better scientific understanding of superconductivity and advance a grow

The German semiconductor manufacturer Infineon Technologies AG has introduced the world’s smallest and most economical chip for “ADSL2+” – the DSL data network of the future. This chip enables telecommunications companies to boost the number of super-high-speed DSL connections that they offer to their customers by approximately one third – without additional investments for cooling or for power supply and without changing cabinet sizes. With ADSL2+, which is expected to be launched as a service