Getting lost in strange towns and cities or trying to find the right way to a particular destination is no longer a problem due to new navigation software that provides on the move information for drivers and pedestrians within seconds.

Developed with the help of almost £1.3 million from the Information Society Technology (IST) Programme of the European Union’s Framework Programme, PEPTRAN gives drivers and mobile users information on the best possible routes within seconds, using their sm

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new performance standard for “across-the-road” radar speed-measuring device systems to help law enforcement agencies to purchase and use with confidence this relatively new method for catching speeders.

Unlike conventional “down-the-road” radar speed-measuring devices, across-the-road radar systems do not require an operator and can be programmed to detect and record vehicles traveling above a predete

Computerized systems that automatically match fingerprints have become so sophisticated that the best of them are accurate more than 99 percent of the time, according to the most comprehensive known study of the systems ever conducted.

Computer scientists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tested 34 commercially available systems provided by 18 companies from around the world. NIST conducted the testing to evaluate the accuracy of fingerprin

Like virtuosos tuning their violins, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have tuned their instruments and harmonized the production of entangled photons, pushing rates to more than 1 million pairs per second.

The brighter and purer entangled states could assist researchers in applications involving quantum information processing – such as quantum computation, teleportation and cryptography – and help scientists better understand the mysterious transition from quan

Tiny pellets of fuel may be safer for hazardous places on earth and burn more efficiently in weightless space and low-gravity environments

Researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering say solid fuel particles may be safer for hazardous environments on earth and burn more efficiently in the microgravity of space than gaseous fuels, which are more combustible and difficult to transport.

In the Spring 2004 issue of NASA Space Research, Fokion Egolfopoulos and Charles

The computing community for many years has longed to be able to to carry out high speed calculations using a genuine Quantum Computer because it would facilitate the practical factorisation of very large numbers and the searching of unordered lists and databases. The rapid breaking of secure codes based on prime numbers would have a lot of practical applications particularly in the banking and military field and would necessitate the development of new cryptographic and security methods to protect va

The control of forest fires has developed into a complex science costing millions of dollars internationally. In the U.S. more than 10 million acres of forest burn annually while, in Canada, over 8,000 fires last year claimed more than 1.5 million hectares. Experts around the world are continuing to research new and innovative ways of battling forest fires.

At Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Systems and Computer Engineering Professor Gabriel Wainer has created a software toolkit tha

Researchers from the Virtual Reality Lab at the University at Buffalo have developed a new tool for transmitting physical touch to the virtual world.

Their virtual clay sculpting system enables users to replicate in real time on a personal computer the physical act of sculpting a block of clay or other malleable material. The resulting 3-D electronic shape shown on the computer screen then can be fine-tuned for product design using standard computer-aided design/modeling software.

ESA is one step nearer to establishing a Telemedicine via Satellite Programme thanks to a constructive meeting with telemedicine experts that took place at ESRIN early last week.

Last Monday the European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) hosted a one-day Road Map Symposium to report on the work that had been done since the last meeting a year ago and to decide on the way forward. At the meeting were representatives of WHO, industry, and doctors and administrators directly involved in the heal

On 9 July 2004, the Near-Earth Object Mission Advisory Panel recommended that ESA place a high priority on developing a mission to actually move an asteroid. The conclusion was based on the panel’s consideration of six near-Earth object mission studies submitted to the Agency in February 2003.

Of the six studies, three were space-based observatories for detecting NEOs and three were rendezvous missions. All addressed the growing realisation of the threat posed by Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) a

Nearly five billion years ago, the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn formed, apparently in radically different ways.So says a scientist at the Laboratory who created exhaustive computer models based on experiments in which the element hydrogen was shocked to pressures nearly as great as those found inside the two planets.

Working with a French colleague, Didier Saumon of Material Science (X-7) created models establishing that heavy elements are concentrated in Saturn’s massive c

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and NASA suggest that materials on the nanoscale may sometimes be subject to the same physical rules as their macro-world counterparts. The findings provide an exception to the conventional scientific notion that objects small enough to be measured in nanometers (one-billionth of a meter) behave according to different rules than larger objects.

A team led by Lawrence Bottomley in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Jona

The launch of NASA’s Aura spacecraft atop a Boeing Delta II rocket is rescheduled for Tuesday, July 13. Launch is set for the opening of a three-minute window at 6:01:59 a.m. EDT (3:01:59 a.m. PDT). Yesterday, during routine pre-launch checks, engineers discovered an improper assembly of the fairing ordnance detonator connector within the Delta II booster fairing. This detonator acts to separate the fairing during flight. Mission managers decided an additional 48 hours was need

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every eighteen months. However current silicon technologies are approaching the limits imposed by quantum mechanics, which will stop Moore’s Law in its tracks within 20 years. New materials and techniques must be found to complement and increase the capabilities of the current silicon technologies to maintain the growth and profitability of the semi-conductor industry.

Semiconducting carbon nanotubes can be doped like sili

The focal length of a lens means that a camera has to have a certain thickness – or so we might think. Insect eyes show that this need not be the case: A camera chip based on the compound-eye principle can be used for person recognition and is as thin as paper.

If people were insects, books on optics would certainly look different. The camera illustrated as the technical equivalent next to a cross-section of the eye with just one lens, one iris and one retina would not be of the conventiona

These images (see link) of the rim of the Hellas basin on Mars were obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft.

The scenes show a portion of the northern region of the Hellas basin at 29° S latitude and 68° E longitude. They were taken during orbit 488 with a resolution of 18.3 metres per pixel. North is to the right.

The Hellas basin is located in the Martian southern hemisphere, and is actually a giant impact crater. It is abo