Today, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) project announced that the computing Grid it is operating now includes more than 100 sites in 31 countries. This makes it the world’s largest international scientific Grid. This Grid is being established in order to deal with the anticipated huge computing needs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

The sites participating in the LCG project are primarily universities and r

On the basis of stellar spectra totalling more than 200 hours of effective exposure time with the 8.2-m VLT Kueyen telescope at Paranal (Chile), a team of astronomers [1] has made a surprising discovery about the stars in the giant southern globular cluster Omega Centauri.

It has been known for some time that, contrary to other clusters of this type, this stellar cluster harbours two different populations of stars that still burn hydrogen in their centres. One population, accou

There are just under three years to go to the first launch of a new European launcher – Vega. Last week representatives of over 20 European space industries met at ESA’s European Space Research Institute, ESRIN, just outside Rome in Italy, to discuss progress on this new small-scale launcher.

“The preliminary project stage is now completed,” said Stefano Bianchi, responsible of the Launch Vehicle Development Programme. “We are now moving from the drawing board to the construction

UK experts develop super-realistic animation system

Computing experts at Cardiff University, UK, are developing a super-realistic animation system that simulates the movements of a face, based on speech. The team in the School of Computer Science has developed highly advanced software which is continually learning the facial dynamics associated with a speaker and applying this knowledge to synthesize realistic facial animations.

“Our aim is to create sophisticated facial a

Neutrinos released in Switzerland are due to be caught in Italy under the international project OPERA. The system of detectors for identifying these mysterious particles is developed by a joint effort of Russian and Ukrainian scientists.

Specialists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia) and Institute of Scintillator Materials NASU (Kharkov, Ukraine) have joined the Project OPERA that is a biggest and most expensive international experiment in the field

A new method for navigation at sea, independent of GPS, is being put forward in a dissertation from Linköping University.

Today merchant marine, military, and recreational boat traffic all rely on the global satellite system GPS to determine their position at sea. But sometimes information from the system is incorrect. Poor visibility or lax attention can then spell disaster.

GPS can be jammed, either unintentionally or intentionally. Signals from the satellites can

World’s Largest Interferometer with Moving Optical Telescopes on Track

The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory has just seen another extension of its already impressive capabilities by combining interferometrically the light from two relocatable 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes.

Following the installation of the first Auxiliary Telescope (AT) in January 2004 (see ESO PR 01/04), the second AT arrived at the VLT platform by the end of 2004.

Black holes have a reputation for voraciously eating everything in their immediate neighborhood, but these large gravity wells also affect electromagnetic radiation and may hinder our ability to ever locate the center of the universe, according to an international research team.

“Any attempt to discover what was happening a long time ago at the beginning of our universe must take into account what gravitationally assisted negative refraction does to the radiation being viewed,” say

The ICT sector has been selected as one of Finland’s five technology focus areas for the future, according to a recent report produced by the country’s National Technology Agency, Tekes. The aim is to ensure that Finland continues to be a leader in the extensive use of ICT.

The Tekes report proposes focusing on ICT services, user-friendliness, knowledge and content management, and making greater use of ICT in real-life applications benefiting people in their day-to-day life and bu

Terrier, a new cutting-edge software for the rapid development of web, intranet and desktop search engines, developed by researchers at the University of Glasgow, has all the prerequisites to become the European answer to Google.

This groundbreaking system from DCS utilises state-of-the-art web search technology. It offers a modular platform for the rapid development of large-scale Information Retrieval applications. Providing indexing and retrieval functionalities, Terrier comes wi

Websites for commuters are nothing new, but researchers in Sunnyvale, Calif., have developed an advanced system with a twist: in addition to tracking traffic congestion, the program crunches data from 14,000 sensors, in some cases every 30 seconds, to decipher evolving rush-hour patterns.

The end result is http://www.BeatTheTraffic.com, a tool that tells commuters how long they can expect to sit in their cars, which shortcuts will get them home faster that day, and even the bes

Saturn’s hazy largest moon, Titan – a body long held to be a frozen analog of early Earth – has a surface shaped largely by an Earth-like interplay of tectonics, erosion by fluids, winds, and perhaps volcanism. So reports the Cassini imaging team in today’s issue of Nature, in their first published presentation of findings from images of Titan gathered since last July.

Titan is about the same size and density as Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. Unlike Ganymede, though, it proba

The dynamic atmosphere of Saturn’s haze-enshrouded moon Titan is revealed in the first Cassini Imaging Team report on Titan, to appear in the March 10 issue of Nature.

Imaging scientists, analyzing images of Titan designed to allow views of the surface and lower atmosphere, have discovered that the winds on Titan blow a lot faster than the moon rotates. In contrast, the jet stream of Earth blows a lot slower than the surface of our planet moves.

Titan is a particularly sl

University of Arkansas researchers have witnessed the birth of a quantum dot and learned more about how such atomic islands form and grow, using the ultrahigh vacuum facility on campus. This information will help researchers better understand and use materials that could lead to small, efficient and powerful computers, communication devices and scientific instruments.

Seongho Cho, Zhiming Wang, and Gregory Salamo report their findings in the upcoming issue of the journal Applie

Pacific Northwest National Lab experiments point to clingy grains of ice to solve age-old mystery of how primordial dust pulled together to form planets

How dust specks in the early solar systems came together to become planets has vexed astronomers for years. Gravity, always an attractive candidate to explain how celestial matter pulls together, was no match for stellar winds. The dust needed help coming together fast, in kilometer-wide protoplanets, in the first few million y

Sandia gas sampling device rapidly determines whether MEMS seals are effective

Just as astronomers want to understand the atmospheres of planets and moons, so engineers want atmospheric knowledge of worlds they create that are the size of pinheads, their “skies” capped by tiny glass bubbles.

Should their silicon inhabitants – microcircuits, microgears, and micropower drivers – exist in a vacuum? An atmosphere of nitrogen? Air as we know it? More importantly, whatever at