In an article posted June 10 to the Astrophysical Journal Letters website, astrophysicists at Stanford report spotting a black hole so massive that it’s more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun. More important, this heavyweight is so far away that the scientists think it formed when the universe first began to light up with stars and galaxies, so it may provide a window into our cosmological origins.

’’In cosmology, it turns out that ’a galaxy a long time ago’ and ’far, far away’ re

A significant milestone in the development of ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission was reached last week when the contract to build the payload was signed between ESA and EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company)-CASA from Spain.

The contract, worth 62 million euros, was signed in Madrid, Spain on 11 June 2004 at the premises of the CDTI (Centre for Development of Industrial Technology). EADS-CASA now heads an industrial consortium of more than 20 companie

When he wasn’t experimenting with lightning or overthrowing the British Empire, Benjamin Franklin found time to fool around with mathematics, inventing a variant of the magic square called Franklin’s squares. Now Maya Ahmed, a mathematics graduate student at UC Davis, has come up with a way to construct both Franklin’s own squares and others of the same type. The methods could have applications in computer programming for business.

A regular magic square is a table of numbers in which any

Speed is the name of the game in the world of racing and now UCL scientists have developed a technique that ’breeds’ winning Formula One cars.

By applying Darwinian principles to the art of motor racing, the researchers demonstrate in simulations that it’s possible to knock crucial tenths of a second off lap time by tailoring a car’s setup to whatever conditions are faced on the track.

In a paper to be presented later this month at a conference in Seattle, rese

The commercial launch of the first ever fool-proof document security system is planned for 2006, reports Marina Murphy in Chemistry & Industry magazine. The system, which uses DNA fingerprinting, will allow documents to be authenticated with an accuracy of billions to one against duplication, according to the Australian scientists working on the system.
The scientists plan to use human DNA in documents such as government bonds, securities, bearer bonds, shares and wills for authentication of docu

After a quiet, six-and-a-half-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey to Saturn aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, the University of Chicago’s dust detector will soon begin its attempt to help unravel the mystery of the planet’s legendary rings one tiny particle at a time.

Cassini will become the first spacecraft ever to enter Saturn’s orbit at precisely 9:30 p.m. CDT June 30. NASA launched Cassini in October 1997. The University’s instrument, called the High Rate Detector, has quietly recorded spora

It is now possible to copy gigabytes of information from Internet

Coinciding with the start of 2004 the Gipuzkoa-based company, Diana Teknologia, launched a new product within its GAMA DIB range of products dedicated to communication through Internet of data with a minimum channel consumption: DIB BACKUP REMOTO – enabling back-up copies of all the company’s data (PCs, laptops and servers) to be made on the Internet.

The rise in security audit and adaptation to LOPD has crea

Graphics Breakthrough Can Benefit Cartoon and Game Creators, Web Marketers, Virtual Museums and Others

A University of Southern California computer scientist has created a powerful and elegant algorithm to compress the large and ungainly files that represent 3-D shapes used in animations, video games and other computer graphics applications.

Mathieu Desbrun, assistant professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering says that digital sound, pictures and vide

An international team of astronomers using the world’s biggest telescopes have directly measured the mass of an ultra-cool brown dwarf star and its companion dwarf star for the first time. Barely the size of the planet Jupiter, the dwarf star weighs in at just 8.5 percent of the mass of our Sun. This is the first ever mass measurement of a dwarf star belonging to a new stellar class of very low mass ultra-cool dwarf stars. The observation is a major step towards our understanding of the types of

Hottest body outside the sun

The hottest spot in the solar system is neither Mercury, Venus, nor St. Louis in the summer. Io, one of the four satellites that the Italian astronomer Galileo discovered orbiting Jupiter almost 400 years ago, takes that prize. The Voyager spacecraft discovered volcanic activity on Io over 20 years ago and subsequent observations show that Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The Galileo spacecraft, named in honor of the astronomer

In the near future, images obtained from magnetic resonance will be common. The aim of the TRAC project is to be able to see internal organs 3-dimensionally using a non-invasive technique. Currently images of the liver are being worked with, but it is hoped that the technique will be useful for any internal structure or tissue.

Vicomtech is one of the enterprises located in the Miramón technological Park. Here they work with, amongst other things, computer-treated images. One of the lines of

This amazing high-resolution image of Phoebe’s pitted surface was taken very near the closest approach by the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens spacecraft.

It shows a crater with a diameter of 13 kilometres and a debris-covered floor. Part of another crater of similar size is visible at left, as is part of a larger crater at the top and many scattered smaller craters.

The radial streaks in the crater are due to downslope movements of loose fragments from impact ejecta (material thrown

Images collected during the Cassini-Huygens close fly-by of Saturn’s moon Phoebe give strong evidence that the tiny moon may be rich of ice and covered by a thin layer of darker material.

Its surface is heavily battered, with large and small craters. It might be an ancient remnant of the formation of the Solar System.
On Friday 11 June, at 21:56 CET, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft flew by Saturn’s outermost moon Phoebe, coming within approximately 2070 kilometres of the satell

An international team of astronomers, led by Hervé Bouy from the Max Planck Institute, Garching, Germany and the Observatoire de Grenoble, France, have for the first time measured the mass of an ultra-cool brown dwarf star. The team performed the measurements using four of the most powerful telescopes available. This is the first-ever mass measurement of an L-type star belonging to the new stellar class of very low-mass stars, discovered a few years ago. With a mass of 6.6% of the solar mass, this ce

Experimental verification would mean more spatial dimensions exist

According to string theory, all the different particles that constitute physical reality are made of the same thing–tiny looped strings whose different vibrations give rise to the different fundamental particles that make up everything we know. Whether this theory correctly portrays fundamental reality is one of the biggest questions facing physicists.

In the June on-line Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP)

A penny for your thoughts would take on a new meaning if spammers were charged for every e-mail message they sent. University of Michigan researchers have a proposal to do just that.

Here’s how it would work: Internet users would be allowed to set a price at which they will accept e-mail from an unknown sender. The higher the price, the less spam the recipient is likely to receive. Recipients can collect the amount they specified for any spam received, unless it was from a pre-approved