An international project is developing new technology that can be installed into high altitude platforms – such as solar powered aircraft or airships – to make Broadband Internet access available to remote areas and moving trains.

With the help of 3.1 million euros from the EU’s Framework Programme, the CAPANINA project brings together 13 partners from across Europe and Japan and is named after the restaurant in Italy where initial discussions were held. It will develop the equipmen

A new astronomical camera has begun operations on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii. The Wide Field Camera (WFCAM), built at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), Edinburgh, is the world’s most powerful infrared survey camera. It will survey large regions of the sky at infrared wavelengths and is expected to discover both the nearest objects outside our Solar System and the farthest known objects in the Universe.

WFCAM has the largest field of view

Can robots learn to communicate by studying and imitating humans’ gestures? That’s what MIRROR’s researchers aimed to find out by studying how infants and monkeys learn complex acts such as grasping and transferring it to robots.

“Our main motivation for the project was to advance the understanding of how humans recognise and imitate gestures,” says Professor Giulio Sandini, coordinator of the three-year IST-funded project, MIRROR. “We did that by building an artificial system t

The Weizmann Institute of Science today announced that a research group headed by Dr. Ernesto Joselevich has developed a new approach to create patterns of carbon nanotubes by formation along atomic steps on sapphire surfaces. Carbon nanotubes are excellent candidates for the production of nanoelectronic circuits, but their assembly into ordered arrays remains a major obstacle toward this application.

The team was initially researching in a different direction: they were trying

Film-makers often prefer tried-and-tested analogue technology. But they may change when they see a new electronic production system. An IST Prize 2005 nominee combining the best from the analogue and digital worlds, it results in more flexible shooting and editing, and innovative 3D and motion effects.

“We defined a broad system architecture for digital production and delivery,” says Paul Walland, who coordinated the IST MetaVision project. “The goal was to revolutionise the way f

The universal open system technology has been developed by Russian researchers with support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE). The new technology will help to finally achieve mutual understanding between computers even if one of them thinks and speaks the Unix language and the other – the language of Windows.

Computers connected to a single network will soon be able to communicate easily with each other thanks

One of the nearest and brightest planetary nebulae has a surprisingly complex 3-D structure

In a process comparable to that of an artist who turns a two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional work of art, astronomers use the two dimensional images that they capture in their high-powered telescopes to reconstruct the three-dimensional structures of celestial objects.

The latest example of this reconstructive artistry is a new model of the Helix Nebula–one of the nea

A massive eruption of atomic oxygen from Saturn’s outer rings, seen by Cassini’s ultraviolet camera as the spacecraft neared its destination, may be an indication that the planet’s wispy E ring is eroding so fast that it could disappear within 100 million years if not replenished.

Cassini’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) detected the oxygen atoms spewing into a huge cloud on the dark side of Saturn’s rings as Cassini prepared to enter orbit around

As NASA’s Cassini spacecraft approached Saturn last July, it found evidence that lightning on Saturn is roughly one million times stronger than lightning on Earth.

That’s just one of several Cassini findings that University of Iowa Space Physicist Don Gurnett will present in a paper to be published Thursday, Dec. 16 in Science Express, an online version of the journal Science, and in a talk to be delivered Friday, Dec. 17 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union

Aboard Cream, an experiment for the study of cosmic rays

A stratospheric balloon of Nasa was launched yesterday, December 16 at 1.28 a.m. Italian time from the Antarctica’s McMurdo base. The balloon raised Cream (Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass) experiment up to 40 kilometres of height. In the experiment, coordinated by Eun Suk Seo of Maryland University, participate American universities (Maryland, Chicago, Penn State, Ohio), South Korea universities (Ewa, KyungPook) and an Itali

Dutch researcher Johan Hoogboom has developed a technique for making LCDs (liquid crystal displays) without the need for cleanrooms. This technique is simpler and cheaper than current methods and is based entirely upon the self-ordering of molecules on a surface. Furthermore, the chemist has shown that these LCDs can be used to make DNA visible to the naked eye.

Hoogboom constructed a surface that can align liquid-crystal molecules. For this he designed and produced an aromatic

EUREKA project E! 2774 FACTORY WELDERS’ PASSPORT has created an online passport that enables skilled welders to move and work freely throughout Europe.

“The Factory Welders’ Passport is a harmonisation of EWF (European Welders Federation) skills and training certificates that allows for the accreditation of welding related personnel, wherever they work in Europe,” says Erik Engh, manager of the Norwegian lead partner, Quality Management Software AS. “It ensures that appropriate w

The Tarantula Nebula is the most vigorous star forming region known in the local Universe. Using the power of the freely available ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator package a young amateur astronomer has created this amazing panorama of the centre of the Tarantula. The original image was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and subsequently retrieved from the ESO/ST-ECF Science Archive in Munich, Germany.

The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is situated 170,0

Glass is a mysterious material, but when researchers apply pressure, it reveals secrets.
Using a variety of techniques, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory saw for the first time ever, the atomic structure of a dense, purely octahedral glass that has eluded scientists for decades. They also witnessed a continuous structural change in the glass, disproving the theory that tetrahedral glasses go through a distinct transition between low- and high-density phases.

“Lit

After eleven months of politics, now it’s time for some real “core values” – not those of the candidates but those of the great gas giant planet, Jupiter.

The planet Jupiter may have a core of tar, according to new reasearch from WUSTL.
Katharina Lodders, Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis research associate professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences, studying data from the Galileo probe of Jupiter, proposes a new mechanism by which the planet formed

A European team based in Heidelberg (Germany) and their colleagues from the HEGRA collaboration have discovered a new, unidentified, very high energy gamma-ray source in our Galaxy. This source was detected via ground-based observations of the Imaging Atmosphere Cherenkov Telescope System.

This system of five telescopes is designed to detect the light produced when high energy particles enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The discovery of this source, TeV J2032+4130, is of particular