The new EU project ePerSpace will integrate all your home devices and your network connections to give you the services you want, in the way you want, on the device you want – “personalised”.

The challenge is to provide communication services tailored to people’s particular individual needs seamlessly over a multitude of devices in the home and to reflect your preferences as much as possible when you are outside the home.

The average European home contains an increasing number

On June 8 Earth-based solar telescopes will follow a tiny black orb as it appears to travel effortlessly across a wrinkled, brilliant sea. Timothy Brown, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will not sit idly by as Venus traverses the Sun for the first time in 122 years at an angle visible from Earth. Peering through a specialized solar telescope in the Canary Islands, Brown will study the chemical composition and winds of Venus’s upper atmosphere, a region poorly ob

Satellite pins down distance to important exploded star

The Veil Nebula, a delicate network of glowing gaseous filaments in the northern constellation of Cygnus the Swan, has long been a favorite of both amateur and professional astronomers. Part of a much larger nebula known as the Cygnus Loop, the Veil is comprised of the leftovers of a star that exploded between 5,000 and 8,000 years ago.

For at least half a century, scientists have probed the Cygnus Loop with various tec

The large number of parties that must collaborate on construction projects presents difficulties in communicating building design information, but DIVERCITY’s design-simulation software utilising virtual reality technology promises significant cost reductions to Europe’s construction industry.

Construction has become an information-intensive industry, with the excessive number of documents during construction projects resulting in processing errors when data is not properly manage

ILOG’s Optimization Adds Customization Options And Improves Production Efficiency

ILOG® (NASDAQ: ILOG; Euronext: ILO, ISIN: FR0004042364), a leading supplier of enterprise-class software components and services, today announced that ILOG’s optimization software has been deployed by the Volkswagen (VW) Group of Spain allowing them to offer customers more customized products and optimize production planning. These new car sequencing and production planning systems have been impleme

Combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared observations with the Palomar 200-inch telescope have uncovered evidence that a gamma-ray burst, one of nature’s most catastrophic explosions, occurred in our Galaxy a few thousand years ago. The supernova remnant, W49B, may also be the first remnant of a gamma-ray burst discovered in the Milky Way.

W49B is a barrel-shaped nebula located about 35,000 light years from Earth. The new data reveal bright infrared rings,

Twenty years ago, astronomers discovered a number of enigmatic radio-emitting filaments concentrated near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These features initially defied explanation, but a new study of radio images of the Galactic center may point to their possible source.
By combining data from the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomer Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University has found evidence that at least

Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have solved a major galactic mystery that may help astronomers in their quest to develop a detailed picture of the chemical evolution of the Milky Way galaxy.

Speaking at the 204th meeting of the American Astronomical Society held May 30 – June 3 in Denver, the researchers reported that the abundance of deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, in the Milky Way galaxy today shows a consistent pattern that can be simply explained, lifting a vei

Seven years of waiting comes to an end on 1 July when the Cassini spacecraft swoops closer to Saturn than any spacecraft previously.

Researchers at Imperial College London will be anxiously awaiting the first signals that all has gone to plan during a 90-minute engine burning procedure known as Saturn Orbit Insertion, or SOI, and that their mission to definitively map the magnetic fields around Saturn has successfully begun.

Never has a spacecraft been put in orbit around Saturn and

With a microscope and computer monitor, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., watch fluorescent bacteria flow through tiny, fluid highways on a dime-sized lab on a chip.

Lab-on-a-chip technology allows chemical and biological processes — previously conducted on large pieces of laboratory equipment — to be performed on a small glass plate with fluid channels, known to scientists as microfluidic capillaries.

“We are studying how lab-on-a-chip

The experiment, titled “Quark Propagation through Cold QCD Matter,” began its run in December 2003 and wrapped up in early March. It probed Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a fundamental theory of particle physics that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons — the basic building blocks of matter. A property of QCD, called confinement, states that no quark can ever be found alone. Instead, quarks combine in pairs or triplets to make up larger particles. For instance, every proton and neutron cont

Hundreds of Maunder minimum stars are not, say UC Berkeley astronomers

A mysterious 17th century solar funk that some have linked to Europe’s Little Ice Age and to global climate change, becomes even more of an enigma as a result of new observations by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.

For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots – cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brig

The very first stars that formed early in the history of the universe were smaller than the massive giants implied by the results of a NASA research satellite, but still larger than the typical stars found in our galaxy today, according to a research team led by the University of Chicago’s Jason Tumlinson.

“We have managed to reconcile within a single theory the two very different leading indicators of the nature of the first stars,” said Tumlinson, the Edwin Hubble Scientist in Astron

Images from NASA’s new Spitzer Space Telescope have allowed researchers to detect the long sought population of “missing” supermassive black holes that powered the bright cores of the earliest active galaxies in the young universe. The discovery completes a full accounting of all the X-ray sources seen in one of the deepest surveys of the universe ever taken. The results were presented at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Denver, Colorado.

Mark Dickinson, of the Natio

A new instrument developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has captured landmark imagery of fast-evolving magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere. Steven Tomczyk (NCAR High Altitude Observatory) presented the images on Monday, May 31, at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Denver.

Animations from the coronal multichannel polarimeter, or CoMP, reveal turbulent, high-velocity magnetic features spewing outward from the Sun’s surface.

Using a new computer model of the Sun, scientists have begun work on a groundbreaking forecast of the next cycle of sunspots. Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) announced new research leading to an improved forecast of cycle 24 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Denver. Predicting features of the solar cycle may help society anticipate sunspots and associated solar storms, which can disrupt communications and power systems and exp