A dedicated team of scientists is spending the next four weeks in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. They are studying the scarce life that exists there and, in the process, helping NASA learn more about how primitive life forms could exist on Mars.

The NASA-funded researchers are studying the Atacama Desert, described as the most arid region on Earth, to understand the desert as a habitat that represents one of the limits of life on Earth. The project, part of NASA’s Astrobiology

Silicon microelectronics has undergone relentless miniaturization during the past 30 years, leading to dramatic improvements in computational capacity and speed. But the end of that road is fast approaching, and scientists and engineers have been investigating another promising avenue: using individual molecules as functional electronic devices.
Now a team of engineers at Northwestern University has become the first to precisely align multiple types of molecules on a silicon surface a

Physicists at Imperial College London are developing a new optical disk with so much storage capacity that every episode of The Simpsons made could fit on just one.

Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference 2004 in Taiwan today, Dr Peter Török, Lecturer in Photonics in the Department of Physics, will describe a new method for potentially encoding and storing up to one Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of data, or 472 hours of film, on one optical disk the size of a CD or DVD

With the recent “warm commissioning” of its linear accelerator, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) has passed a crucial test and milestone on its way to completion in 2006.

The SNS’s linear accelerator, or linac, is composed of two sections: the “warm,” or room temperature section, and a superconducting section that operates at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the team of six DOE national laboratories

Since it started orbiting Saturn last June, the Cassini mission has returned incredible images of the gas giant, its dazzling rings and its enigmatic moons. But its most dramatic chapter will come this January, when a European lander probe (Huygens) that has been piggybacking on Cassini for the last seven years is sent on a fiery plunge into the murky atmosphere of Saturn’s largest and most mysterious moon, Titan–a chapter that would have ended in disaster, save for an engineer called Boris Sm

The recently released Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) – the most sensitive image of the distant universe ever obtained – has provided UK astronomers with a window on star formation when the universe was young, revealing some of the earliest star forming galaxies yet detected.

The research was led by Dr Andrew Bunker at the University of Exeter and graduate student Elizabeth Stanway at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. Their results have been accepted

Seismologists, Ecuadorian officials, area residents could benefit from improved data

A rumbling South American volcano has gone wireless: Computer scientists at Harvard University have teamed up with seismologists at the University of New Hampshire and University of North Carolina to fit an Ecuadorian peak with a wireless array to monitor volcanic activity. The sensors should help researchers, officials, and local residents understand and plan for eruptions of Tungarahua, one of Ec

To mark the 50th anniversary of CERN ’s creation, local Swiss and French authorities have clubbed together to offer the Organization a spectacular illumination of the 27-kilometre ring of the Large Hadron Collider accelerator. At 20:00 sharp on 29 September, Micheline Spoerri, Head of Geneva’s Department of Justice, Police and Security, will throw the switch for 24 powerful ‘skytracer’ floodlights to light up the night sky of the Geneva – Pays de Gex region.

This illumination forms

A new vision for radio astronomy is bringing together all 20 of Europe’s leading radioastronomy institutes. They plan to build on existing collaboration and significantly enhance the quality and quantity of science currently produced by European astronomers.

RadioNet will create an integrated radio astronomy network providing European scientists with access to world-class facilities along with a research and development plan aimed at supporting and enhancing these facilities. This

Too much heat can destroy a sturdy automobile engine or a miniature microchip. As scientists and engineers strive to make ever-smaller nanoscale devices, from molecular motors and switches to single-molecule transistors, the control of heat is becoming a burning issue. The shapes of molecules really matter, say scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Scranton who timed the flow of vibrational heat energy through a water-surfactant-organic s

Defining over 1,200 of the most commonly used words in the security field

The newly released Information Security Dictionary (1st Edition) (published by Springer Science) offers information security experts, systems analysts, policy makers, managers and students a reference tool to find the most commonly used terms in the field. The dictionary defines these terms in easy to understand language, provides more detail in Tables and easy cross-referencing leading the reader to related te

Centers top list of awards from NSF’s $30 million Cyber Trust program

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced 33 new projects from its $30 million Cyber Trust program, including two new cybersecurity research centers that will focus on eliminating plagues of Internet worms and viruses and on building better security defenses through a deeper understanding of Internet “ecology.”

“The Cyber Trust program—the centerpiece of NSF’s leadership of cybersecurity rese

Predicting the movements of mobile cell phone communications systems, thus providing a guarantee of the quality of service (QoS) and offering locating services, as well as recognising imperfect texts on a dictionary basis, are two of the applications demonstrated by José Javier Astrain Escola, engineer in the Public University of Navarre. The tool that makes this task possible is one that employs fuzzy state automatas with empty chain transitions.

At the beginning of the study, this

A microprocessor adapting itself to the actual use and environment. That’s the way to keep the energy consumption of future ‘mobile companions’ within limits and be flexible at the same time. Paul Heysters, who finishes his PhD-research at the University of Twente on September 24, developed a new type of processor. His ‘Montium’ is a reconfigurable processor adapting itself towards low energy consumption. It is possible to get ten times better performance, with ten times lower energy consumption at

A mystery lurking at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy – an object radiating high-energy gamma rays – has been detected by an international team of astronomers. Their research, published today (September 22nd) in the Journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was carried out using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa.

The Galactic Centre harbours a number of potential gamma-ray sources, including a supermassive bla

The University of Illinois at Chicago unveiled today the world’s most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machine for human studies, capable of imaging not just the anatomy but metabolism within the brain.

This advanced technology ushers in a new age of metabolic imaging that will help researchers understand the workings of the human brain, detect diseases before their clinical signs appear, develop targeted drug therapies for illnesses like stroke and provide a better understa