A team from CERN and Caltech has set a new Internet2 Land Speed Record by transferring data across nearly 11,000 kilometres at an average rate of 6.25 gigabits per second (Gbps), nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, from Los Angeles, USA, to Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) is an open and ongoing competition for the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end networks.

The mark of 68,431 terabit-metres per second, which used the same IPv4 protoc

Ever wished that you could know what a place was like before you booked a holiday or you could revisit where you went on holiday? A new virtual reality tool created by the IST project BENOGO allows you to do just this.

The project was initiated to build on research into a new image-based rendering (IBR) technique that had been carried out by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the project partners. BENOGO aimed to further develop the technologies to produce an innovative system to pe

Scientists have found that the way spiders stick to ceilings could be the key to making Post-it® notes that don’t fall off – even when they are wet. A team from Germany and Switzerland have made the first detailed examinations of a jumping spider’s ‘foot’ and have discovered that a molecular force sticks the spider to almost anything. The force is so strong that these spiders could carry over 170 times their own body weight while standing on the ceiling. The research is published today (Monday 19 Apr

Berkeley Lab physicists develop way to digitally restore and preserve
audio recordings
The 1995 discovery of the top quark and singer Marian Anderson’s 1947 rendition of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen may seem unrelated. But through an interagency agreement with the Library of Congress, the same technology used to study subatomic particles is helping to restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear.

“We developed a way to image the grooves in a recording that is simil

Distant star reveals planet Like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass to unveil hidden clues, modern day astronomers used cosmic magnifying effects to reveal a planet orbiting a distant star. This marks the first discovery of a planet around a star beyond Earth’s solar system using gravitational microlensing. A star or planet can act as a cosmic lens to magnify and brighten a more distant star lined up behind it. The gravitational field of the foreground star bends

Embed the open source Linux operating system within a microprocessor and what do you get? For IST project ACEOS it led to demonstration applications for standard Linux networking and voice telecommunications.

Porting Linux to a new processor platform

Project coordinator Gregory Doumenis of the Athens-based system house Global Digital Technologies (GDT) explains why the ACEOS project was considered successful. “We were very happy with the project results because, one, we ma

VLT looks through narrow atmospheric window and produces most detailed images yet New images of unsurpassed clarity have been obtained with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) of formations on the surface of Titan, the largest moon in the Saturnian system. They were made by an international research team [1] during recent commissioning observations with the “Simultaneous Differential Imager (SDI)”, a novel optical device, just installed at the NACO Adaptive Optics instrument [2].

With the hi

Although technologically and economically superior to their proprietary counterparts, GNU/Linux operating systems are very rarely used in audio and multimedia production. AGNULA is out to change this with its easy-to-use “free software” infrastructure.

Free, or “libre software”, gives the users freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve the software, even sell copies. To qualify as free software it must also be available for commercial use, development, and distribution.

Using technology from Europe’s space programme ski maker Rossignol hopes to beat the world speed skiing record at Les Arcs Pro Mondial in France next week. Using skis stabilised by a mechanism originally developed for ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, the aim is to reach an astonishing 255 km/h down the slopes.

Skis Rossignol teamed up with ESA’s Technology Transfer Programme to identify innovative technologies which could help beat the records. A world championship title in 2003 showed that they w

Scientists have not yet found a way to actually make time run backward, but in the cutting-edge world of recent acoustics research, they have shown a way to make sound waves run backward in a kind of ultra-focused reverse echo. By the technology known as time-reversal acoustics, sound waves – in exact reverse order from the original sound – echo directly and very precisely back to their source point.

The technology promises a wide array of applications, including medical applications such a

In ancient maps of the world, expanses of unknown territory might hold a warning to would-be explorers: Here there be monsters. For today’s explorers seeking to navigate and understand the world of science, the monsters are the untamed collections of data that inhabit a largely uncharted landscape.

The April 6, 2004, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) features nearly 20 articles by some of tomorrow’s mapmakers. Representing the computer, information and cog

The hunt for space rocks on a collision course with Earth has so far been pretty much limited to the Northern Hemisphere. But last week astronomers took the search for Earth-threatening asteroids to southern skies. Astronomers using a refurbished telescope at the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory discovered their first two near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) on March 29. NEAs are asteroids that pass near the Earth and may pose a threat of collision. Si

Home is the place we know best. The Milky Way, our Galaxy, is the exception to the rule, however: Our knowledge of our nearest stellar neighbours has long been seriously incomplete and – worse – skewed by prejudice concerning their behaviour. In the past, stars were selected for observation because they were thought to be ’interesting’ in some sense, not because they were typical of stars in general. Naturally, this gave a biased view of the evolution of our Galaxy – that serves as the prototype of

A rare celestial event was captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as Titan — Saturn’s largest moon and the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere — crossed in front of the X-ray bright Crab Nebula. The X-ray shadow cast by Titan allowed astronomers to make the first X-ray measurement of the extent of its atmosphere.

On January 5, 2003, Titan transited the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed to occur in the year 1054. Although Saturn and

Results of 1001 observing nights shed new light on our Galaxy

Unknown history

Home is the place we know best. But not so in the Milky Way – the galaxy in which we live. Our knowledge of our nearest stellar neighbours has long been seriously incomplete and – worse – skewed by prejudice concerning their behaviour. Stars were generally selected for observation because they were thought to be “interesting” in some sense, not because they were typical. This has resulted in

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have designed an online, Web-based system for ordering total parenteral nutrition (TPN) that identifies and pre-emptively eliminates potentially serious calculation errors.

The Children’s Center team describes its “TPN Calculator” in the April issue of Pediatrics.

“TPN Calculator” not only reduced TPN order errors in the Hopkins Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) by nearly 90 percent, but also proved to be faster and ea