The Swift satellite’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) has seen first light, capturing an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, long loved by amateur astronomers as the “perfect” face-on spiral galaxy. The UVOT now remains poised to observe its first gamma-ray burst and the Swift observatory, launched into Earth orbit in November 2004, is now fully operational.

Swift is a NASA-led mission dedicated to the gamma-ray burst mystery. These random and fleeting explosions likely sign

If you are touring in Finnish Lapland, you no longer need to shiver outside when watching the heavens in order to see the Northern Lights. Information about the Northern Lights can now be received directly into a mobile phone via the world’s first Aurora Borealis Alarm System.

“This is a service in which local beliefs, the natural surroundings, and technology are combined in an interesting way. Asian tourists in particular are interested in the system,” says Miikka Raulo, the managi

The Finnish company Deltabit Oy is creating awareness of access-control systems that are replacing traditional keys. A fingerprint already opens the door to keep-fit rooms at Tampere, Finland.

Deltabit Oy has been developing systems and applications based on fingerprint recognition for more than six years. The basic idea is the keyless concept. Fingerprint recognition can be used in access control for opening doors, controlling burglar alarms and supervising working hours. The only

100 years after Einstein’s landmark work on Brownian motion, physicists have discovered a new concept of temperature that could be the key to explaining how ice and snow particles flow during an avalanche, and could lead to a better way of handling tablets in the pharmaceutical industry. This research is reported today in a special Einstein Year issue of the New Journal of Physics published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellscha

100 years after Einstein’s landmark work on Brownian motion, physicists have discovered a new concept of temperature that could be the key to explaining how ice and snow particles flow during an avalanche, and could also lead to a better way of handling tablets in the pharmaceutical industry. This research is reported today in a special Einstein Year issue of the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikal

100 years after Einstein’s landmark paper, optical tweezer technology could confirm the theory of classical Brownian motion in details that Einstein missed when he first proposed it a century ago. This research is reported today in a special Einstein Year issue of the New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org) published jointly by the Institute of Physics and the German Physical Society (Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft).

“Optical tweezers” use a focused laser beam to trap and stud

University of California, Berkeley, physicists can now tune in to and hear normally inaudible quantum vibrations, called quantum whistles, enabling them to build very sensitive detectors of rotation or very precise gyroscopes. Quantum whistle
Hear the synchronized vibrations from a chorus of more than 4,000 nano-whistles, created when physicists pushed superfluid helium-4 though an array of nanometer-sized holes. Note that the pitch drops as the pressure drops.

A quantum w

The art of communication becomes a science when dealing with computers. Laying the foundations for future research in human-computer interactions, PF-STAR’s speech and gesture databases, and virtual agents open up new approaches to machine-based communications.

Completed in September 2004, the IST project PF-STAR aimed to lay the foundations for future research efforts in Multilingual and Multisensorial Communication, or MMC for short. Over the project’s two-year term, research

To make it easier to measure the security of an information technology product or system, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have developed a common specification language–Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF)–for writing security checklists and related documents.

Increasingly, computers and other information technology products are vulnerable to multiple threats including viruse

ESA’s SMART-1 captured its first close-range images of the Moon this January, during a sequence of test lunar observations from an altitude between 1000 and 5000 kilometres above the lunar surface.

SMART-1 entered its first orbit around the Moon on 15 November 2004. It has spent the two months following spiralling down to the Moon and testing its array of instruments.

The first four days after being captured by the lunar gravity were very critical. There had been

Carbon nanotubes—a hot nanotechnology with many potential uses—may find one of its quickest applications in the next generation of standards for optical power measurements, which are essential for laser systems used in manufacturing, medicine, communications, lithography, space-based sensors and other technologies.

As described in a forthcoming paper in Applied Optics,* scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Renewable Energy

Three-Part Solution Leads to Better Web Services Performance

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new Web Services Recommendations: XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP), SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block (RRSHB). These recommendations provides ways to efficiently package and transmit binary data included or referenced in a SOAP 1.2 message.

Web Services Applications Need Effective,

A key process that enhances the production of nuclear energy in the interior of dense stars has been re-created in the laboratory for the first time by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The work may help scientists study topics such as nuclear fusion as a possible energy source and demonstrates a new method for studying and modeling dense stellar objects such as white dwarfs.

The NIST experiments, described in the Jan. 18 issue of Physical Revi

Kinniya Hospital on the east coast of Sri Lanka was destroyed by the Dec. 26 tsunami, and its 40 patients and hospital staff are missing. It was just one of many buildings poorly prepared for actual disaster. In the weeks and months ahead, scientists and engineers will be studying damage sites all over the island to evaluate the power of the tidal wave and recommend new construction standards to help such buildings withstand the expected stresses.

A new Web site at Cornell Universit

Clear evidence in a Chinese meteorite for the past presence of chlorine-36, a short-lived radioactive isotope, lends further support to the controversial concept that a nearby supernova blast was involved in the formation of our solar system, according to a report forthcoming in the February 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (to be published online today).

Known as the Ningqiang carbonaceous chondrite, the primitive meteorite is a space relic that fo

These images from the Huygens DISR instrument show new features, such as evidence of flow around ’islands’, deposits of water ice and channels which could have been created by methane springs.