Credit card fraud is one of the fastest growing crimes costing French banks over €41 million last year. The crime figures remain high despite progress already made and attempts by Interpol to fight fraud on a European scale.

Most of the cases of card fraud recorded last year involved stolen credit card numbers, which were used to buy goods or services either by phone or on the internet. Often fraud victims did not know their card had been used illegally until they received their monthly stat

The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot dying star smothered in a blanket of ‘hailstones’. A new Hubble image reveals fresh detail in the wings of this ‘cosmic butterfly’.

This image of the Bug Nebula, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), shows impressive walls of compressed gas. A torus (‘doughnut’) shaped mass of dust surrounds the inner nebula (seen at the upper right).

At the h

W3C’s WS-CDL Targets Peer-to-Peer Web Services Collaboration

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued the Web Services Choreography Description Language Version 1.0 as a W3C First Public Working Draft. The Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) is targeted to coordinate interactions among Web services and their users. This is the first in the series of WS-CDL drafts.

Choreography is the Key to Enterprise-Level Web Services

Business

Very Large Telescope Witnesses Close Interaction in Galaxy Family

Stars like our Sun are members of galaxies, and most galaxies are themselves members of clusters of galaxies. In these, they move around among each other in a mostly slow and graceful ballet. But every now and then, two or more of the members may get too close for comfort – the movements become hectic, sometimes indeed dramatic, as when galaxies end up colliding.

ESO PR Photo 12/04 shows an example of such a co

Technical Insights world embedded memory technologies analysis

The launch of the sophisticated magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) technology is expected to revolutionize the embedded memory market. It combines the high storage and low cost of dynamic RAM (DRAM), high speed of static RAM (SRAM) and the non-volatility of flash memory to provide a single and unified memory solution.

“Nonvolatility is a key feature that extends battery life and lowers power consumption, retain

Kingston University is heading a major investigation that could help police officers solve crime more quickly. Experts from Kingston’s Digital Imaging Research Centre have joined forces with Surrey University and independent research organisation Sira for a project called REVEAL (Recovering Evidence from Video by Fusing Video Evidence Thesaurus and Video Meta-Data). The partners have been jointly awarded £390,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Programme (EPSRC) to find ways to cu

Promoting the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) in industrial embedded systems, the project INES resulted in 19 best practice case studies, training materials and a comprehensive website offering the source code online.

The IST Programme-funded INES, a 24-month project launched 1 January 2002, involved a pan-European consortium of six Technology Expertise Centres (Italy, Belgium, Sweden, the UK, Slovenia and Romania) and 19 user companies across a broad range of markets.

The

University of Chicago astronomer Patrick Palmer last studied a comet in 2000, but he is the member of research teams that will make scientific observations of two comets this spring, and they narrowly missed viewing a third.

Some astronomers are predicting that the two comets, NEAT and LINEAR, will be visible with the naked eye, in the eastern sky shortly before sunrise or in the western sky shortly after sunset, during the next few weeks. But neither comet will be anywhere near as bright

A universal three-in-one set-top network interface for domestic and small office markets that promises access to voice, video and data streams delivering a rich repertoire of services over triple-play broadband networks has been developed by IST project AVPACK.

“The unit is aimed at network operators and service providers that deploy such networks, and will enable them to offer value-added services and develop new markets,” says Christos Georgopoulos of inAccess Networks, the company market

At 9:57:24 am Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, April 20, 2004, the Gravity Probe B spacecraft had a picture-perfect launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in South-central California. The Boeing Delta II rocket hit the exact center of the bull’s eye in placing the spacecraft in its target polar orbit, 400 miles above the Earth.

“The Gravity Probe B Mission Operations Team has performed very well during this critical spacecraft activation period,” said Tony Lyons, Gravity Probe B NASA D

The speed of magnetic recording – a crucial factor in a computer’s power and multimedia capabilities – depends on how fast one can switch a magnet’s poles. An experiment at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) found that the ultimate speed of magnetic switching is at least 1,000 times slower than previously expected. The result, which appears in the April 22 issue of the journal Nature, has implications for future hard disk computer drive technologies.

In the push toward eve

Ever wished you could run some of your daily chores at the flick of a switch? Well, this may soon become reality thanks to an open source home automation and networking platform from IST project HOMETALK.

HOMETALK set out to overcome the problems posed by existing home networking, automation and control systems that automate procedures such as turning on the washing machine. As Christos Georgopoulos, CEO inAccess Networks, Greece, provider of a smart Home Gateway to the project explains: “

These images from ESA’s Mars Express show the western flank of the shield volcano Olympus Mons in the Tharsis region of the western Martian hemisphere.

These images were taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) during orbit 143 from an altitude of 266 kilometres. They were taken with a resolution of about 25 metres per pixel and are centred at 222° East and 22° North. North is to the right.
The images show the western flank of Olympus Mons and the escarpment at lower left ris

The Arecibo Observatory telescope, the largest and most sensitive single dish radio telescope in the world, is about to get a good deal more sensitive

Today (Wednesday, April 21) the telescope got a new “eye on the sky” that will turn the huge dish, operated by Cornell University for the National Science Foundation, into the equivalent of a seven-pixel radio camera.

The complex new addition to the Arecibo telescope was hauled 150 meters (492 feet) above the telescope’s

If a University of California, Berkeley, physicist’s vision of Jupiter is correct, the giant planet will be in for a major global temperature shift over the next decade as most of its large vortices disappear.

But fans of the Great Red Spot can rest easy. The most famous of Jupiter’s vortices – which are often compared to Earth’s hurricanes – will stay put, largely because of its location near the planet’s equator, says Philip Marcus, a professor at UC Berkeley’s De

Specialised design problems can require massive computing efforts. Middleware tools to harness the power of Grid computing have been proven to work in real industrial applications, through the work of IST project DAMIEN.

Helping to design aircraft

EADS, a major aerospace company and DAMIEN consortium member, used the system in real applications across its sites in Europe. “Before you can get official certification for a new design of aircraft, extensive tests have to be car