Cutting edge research at the University of Ulster into how to make complex computers and communications systems manage themselves could power the next generation of US space probes, it was revealed today.

Roy Sterritt, from the University’s Computer Science Research Institute, was today addressing NASA scientists in Washington about his research.

Mr Sterritt said that current computing networks are now so complex and difficult to manage that by 2010, 220 million people

Close encounter may explain some objects beyond Neptune

Computer simulations show a close encounter with a passing star about 4 billion years ago may have given our solar system its abrupt edge and put small, alien worlds into distant orbits around our sun.

The study, which used a supercomputer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was published in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature by physicist Ben Bromley of the University of Utah and astron

A practical method for automatically correcting data-handling errors in quantum computers has been developed and demonstrated by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Described in the Dec. 2, 2004, issue of the journal Nature, the NIST work is the first demonstration of all the steps of error correction for quantum computers, a futuristic, potentially very powerful form of computing that uses the quantum properties of atoms or other particles as

The map is not the territory, runs the famous quote, but maps do represent an unparalleled tool for emergency management. Nobody knows this better than humanitarian organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières, whose work often occurs within territories without any usable maps whatsoever.

ESA has been working in partnership with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Belgium to remedy this. The result is the Medical Humanitarian Disaster Mapping Service (HUMAN). Since last year the servi

New CICS products enable customers to more easily integrate business processes and transform their existing applications IBM today announced the release of CICS Transaction Server for z/OS V3.1 which provides an enhanced Web Services solution. Also announced is CICS Transaction Gateway V6, which provides a J2EE standards-based connectivity solution. Following on the heels of the 35th anniversary of CICS earlier this year, this announcement enables businesses to fully exploit the agilit

Very Large Telescope Takes Snapshots of Two Grand-Design Spiral Galaxies Images of beautiful galaxies, and in particular of spiral brethren of our own Milky Way, leaves no-one unmoved. It is difficult indeed to resist the charm of these impressive grand structures. Astronomers at Paranal Observatory used the versatile VIMOS instrument on the Very Large Telescope to photograph two magnificent examples of such “island universes”, both of which are seen in a southern constellation wit

As the UK prepares to celebrate Einstein Year in 2005, a physicist from Bristol University is looking for stories that can be used to tell taxi drivers what physics is all about. Sir Michael Berry, whose own father was a London cabbie, thought of the idea after failing to give a taxi driver a clear explanation of what it is that physicists actually do. Berry realized that physicists need a stock of good and convincing stories that show how physics affects people’s lives. Looking back, he now

ILOG JRules Enables Customization and Business Process Control For Faster Business Response Times

ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364) today announced that QAD, Inc., (NASDAQ: QADI), a leading provider of enterprise applications for global manufacturers, has selected ILOG JRules™, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rule Management System (BRMS) product line, to help streamline and simplify the management of business-rules within MFG/PRO, QAD’s flagship ERP produc

A big advantage of space robots is that they need neither food nor drink and can support very inhospitable conditions. More important still, although expensive to design and produce, their loss is always preferable to that of an astronaut. At this month’s ASTRA 2004 workshop robots designed in ESA’s space research and technical centre in the Netherlands attracted much attention.

“On Earth, robots regularly take over when it comes to repetitive tasks or when human health ma

If you run into Ed Saff at a cocktail party and ask him what he does for a living, the mathematician is likely to reply that he is working on a “method for creating the perfect poppy-seed bagel.” Then he’ll pause and add, “Maybe that’s not the most accurate description, but it’s the most digestible.”

More accurately, Saff, who is a mathematics professor at Vanderbilt, has been working with his colleague Associate Professor of Mathematics Doug Hardin to come up with a new and improv

New observations of an oddball planetary system 150 light-years from Earth may force astronomers to rethink the textbook definition of a planet and the accepted idea about how such a body forms. The observations suggest that either some planets are superheavy or that planets can form from disks of gas and dust that encircle not just a single star but two starlike objects.

Two years ago, when astronomers at the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, reported their findings on

The device, which analyses the brain waves of the driver, has been designed by the students at the Public University of Navarre and presented at the XVIII Technical Seminar on Automotion.

A system to prevent somnolence would be of great advantage for professional drivers, who spend many hours behind the steering wheel of their vehicle. It is estimate that sleepiness causes 1% of accidents.

The system was presented at the XVIII Technical Seminar on Automotion. This year’

Plastic optic fibres are 1-millimetre diameter threads, similar to a guitar string. Nowadays, optic fibres are used in the home, cars, trains and aeroplanes, for example.

How is the information transmitted?

At one end of the fibre the light source, either LED or laser, is attached. Lasers are faster and, thereby, can send greater quantities of information; but they are also more expensive.

Light emanating from the source will immediately propagate through the fi

A team of Danish physicists has taken a crucial step towards an Internet that is faster and more secure than what we know today. The researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have created an atomic memory that, in time, will be able to break the limits for Internet communication. The team’s breakthrough was published in the prominent journal, Nature, on 25 November 2004.

From Internet to Quantum Internet

The Internet is getting faster

MiniGRAIL: first spherical gravitational wave antenna in the world

Since last week, Professor Giorgio Frossati of Leiden University’s Institute of Physics can ‘listen’ to gravitational waves. That is, if such a wave happens to come along. Gravitational waves originate from violent clashes between black holes in the universe and from instabilities in neutron stars.

MiniGRAIL is the name of the first spherical gravitational wave antenna in the world. The ball was made at t

VLT Interferometer Studies the Inner Region of Circumstellar Discs [1]

One of the currently hottest astrophysical topics – the hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars – has just received an important impetus from new spectral observations with the MIDI instrument at the ESO VLT Interferometer (VLTI).

An international team of astronomers [2] has obtained unique infrared spectra of the dust in the innermost regions of the proto-planetary discs around three young