Fogged up glasses, windscreens and bathroom mirrors may be a thing of the past.

Researchers have invented a new, permanent, multi-purpose coating technology that will prevent your spectacles, car windscreen or bathroom mirror fogging up ever again. The coating, called XeroCoat, also cuts out unwanted reflections from glass, letting more light through. Making it ideal for spectacles and improving the performance of solar cells and glasshouses.

University of Queensland phys

When earthquakes strike, people often get trapped in buildings. Search and rescue teams can pinpoint some victims using sniffer dogs and sensors. But a new European system that takes pictures during or after a building collapse promises to save many more lives.

The ‘low-cost catastrophic event capturing system’ is the fruit of the IST Loccatec project. It comprises capturing devices (small, autonomous infrared cameras) and a portable central unit for the rescue teams. The cameras – p

For the first time, an international team of astronomers led by Guy Perrin from the Paris Observatory/LESIA, (Meudon, France) and Stephen Ridgway from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (Tucson, Arizona, USA) has observed the close environment of five so-called red giant Mira stars, using astronomical interferometric techniques. They found that the observed Mira stars are embedded in a shell of water vapor and possibly of carbon monoxide that extends to twice the stellar radius. Studying the

ESA’s Huygens probe, now orbiting Saturn on board the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft, is in good health and successfully passed its fifteenth ‘In-Flight Checkout’ on 14 September 2004.

This in-flight checkout procedure was the last but one planned before separation of the Huygens probe from Cassini in December this year, and it included some specific activities that were intended to prepare for the separation. The main difference in this procedure from previous checkouts was that

Fundamental questions that particle physicists have pondered for decades might be answered when a $9.2 million neutron physics beam line is built at the Department of Energy’s Spallation Neutron Source on Chestnut Ridge.

At the core of physicists’ excitement is the fact that the SNS will produce up to 100 times more neutrons than are produced by any comparable source in the world. Tapping in to those neutrons will be the Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line, which will he

A University of California scientist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and researchers from Northrop Grumman Space Technology have developed a novel method for generating electrical power for deep-space travel using sound waves. The traveling-wave thermoacoustic electric generator has the potential to power space probes to the furthest reaches of the Universe.

In research reported in a recent issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Laboratory scientist Scott Backhaus an

It started with tennis balls. As a former collegiate tennis player, Daniela Rus habitually rolls two tennis balls around in her hand as she paces her office. As a robotics researcher at Dartmouth College, she wondered why the tennis balls shouldn’t be able to roll themselves around.

She soon determined that electromagnets didn’t have enough lifting power to solve the tennis-ball problem. However, her question led to a decade-long research program into the challenges of designing robot

Dedication Ceremony in Tucson, Ariz., Will Unveil the World’s Most Powerful Ground-Based Telescope to an International Audience

The LBT Corporation announced today that the dedication ceremonies for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will be held Oct. 15. This scientific achievement will be marked by a formal dedication dinner for partners and their guests. The media is invited to attend tours of the LBT and Arizona astronomy facilities in advance of the dedication.

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When a major disaster–man-made or natural–takes down the phone system, who ya gonna call? No one, ’cause the phone’s dead, right? Not if you’re using a novel emergency communications system under development by the Maryland start-up TeleContinuity Inc. With initial support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program (ATP), TeleContinuity is creating a “survivable” emergency telephone system back-up network that keeps individuals, compani

A simplified design for ultra-sensitive X-ray detectors offering more precise materials analysis has been demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The advance is a step toward making such devices cheaper and easier to produce. Users may eventually include the semiconductor industry, which needs better X-ray detectors to identify and distinguish between nanoscale contaminant particles on silicon wafers.

The new design, described in the Sept. 13 issue of App

Precision placement may help in building nanoscale devices

In an effort to put more science into the largely trial and error building of nanostructures, physicists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated new methods for placing what are typically unruly individual atoms at precise locations on a crystal surface. Reported in the Sept. 9, 2004, online version of the journal Science, the advance enables scientists to observe

University of California scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a theory describing light pulse dynamics in optical fibers that explains how an interplay of noise, line imperfections and pulse collisions lead to the deterioration of information in optical fiber lines. The theory will help to enhance the performance necessary for high-speed optical communication systems like video on demand and ultra-broadband Internet, and the research has helped establish a new field of

A small unmanned observatory high on the Antarctic plateau provides the best star-viewing site on Earth, according to research published today in Nature.

Australian researchers have shown than a ground-based telescope in Antarctica can take images almost as good as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, at a fraction of the cost. “It represents arguably the most dramatic breakthrough in the potential for ground-based optical astronomy since the invention of the telescope,” says Unive

A novel Antarctic telescope with 16-m diameter mirrors would far outperform the Hubble Space Telescope, and could be built at a tiny fraction of its cost, says a scientist from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney, Australia.

Tests by a team from the University of New South Wales, reported in the journal ‘Nature’ this week [16 September], show that the ‘Dome C’ site in the Australian Antarctic Territory is by far the best place ever tested on Earth for doing infrared and optic

Applied Search Technology Ltd (AST) of Aston University in Birmingham, UK has announced the launch of its new software CADFind Sketch and Search – the first commercial design retrieval system in the world that can find 2D engineering drawings from a sketch.

The new software could save manufacturing companies thousands of pounds in part design by allowing the user to search, retrieve and use geometrically similar parts from their database, based on a customer drawing or a simple ske

British astronomers are celebrating a world first that could revolutionise the future of astronomy. They have just begun a project to operate a global network of the world’s biggest robotic telescopes, dubbed ’RoboNet-1.0’ which will be controlled by intelligent software to provide rapid observations of sudden changes in astronomical objects, such as violent Gamma Ray Bursts, or 24-hour surveillance of interesting phenomena. RoboNet is also looking for Earth-like planets, as yet unseen elsewhere