Lava lakes could be Ionian versions of Earth’s mid-ocean ridges

Investigations into lava lakes on the surface of Io, the intensely volcanic moon that orbits Jupiter, may provide clues to what Earth looked like in its earliest phases, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“When I look at the data, it becomes startlingly suggestive to me that this may be a window onto the primitive history of Earth,” said Tracy K. P. G

Debris from gobbled-up galaxy could be ’smoking gun’ for dark matter

WIMPs speeding at 670,000 mph on a “highway” in space may be raining onto Earth – a phenomenon that might prove the existence of “dark matter” that makes up most our galaxy and one-fourth of the universe, says a study co-authored by a University of Utah physicist.

Many researchers have long suspected that dark matter may be made of WIMPS or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which are theorized subatomic

Researchers at Wright State University have developed a prototype device to help blind individuals “see.”

Nikolaos Bourbakis, Ph.D., Ohio Board of Regents Distinguished Professor of Information Technology at Wright State’s College of Engineering and Computer Science is the principal investigator. The project is a cooperative venture with Arizona State University (ASU).

“Our object is to develop intelligent assistants that can help blind and visually impaired individuals eff

Research paves the way to next generation of ’atomic clocks’

Three of the world’s premier measurement laboratories – including the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – have lined up the “hash marks” from four of the world’s best optical frequency rulers and declared that they match. The experiments, reported in the March 19, 2004, issue of the journal Science, are a significant step toward next-generation “atomic clocks

The number of applications requiring random numbers increases continuously. They are used for example in cryptographic applications to guarantee the secrecy of electronic communications, in scientific calculations or in chance games and lotteries. In spite of this, their generation remains a difficult task. The Group of Applied Physics and the Computer Science Department of the University of Geneva team with the company id Quantique to launch the first website allowing to download random numbers from

Thanks to ESA’s Mars Express, we now know that Mars has vast fields of perennial water ice, stretching out from the south pole of the Red Planet.

Astronomers have known for years that Mars possessed polar ice caps, but early attempts at chemical analysis suggested only that the northern cap could be composed of water ice, and the southern cap was thought to be carbon dioxide ice.
Recent space missions then suggested that the southern ice cap, existing all year round, could be a mixture

The first computing resources of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) TeraGrid became fully available for scientific use in January, and some of the first applications will be tracking the formation of galaxies in the early universe and finding the most efficient and least expensive ways to clean up groundwater pollution.

Other early TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org) users will study seismic events and analyze biomolecular dynamics on the Linux clusters at the National Center for Supercomp

A ’fast, easy and confidential’ online hospital order system was recently successfully tested in hospitals in Belgium, Greece and Italy.

Apostolos Kontogeorgis, coordinator of the IST programme-funded project OPUS, saw a great need for such a technology. “The pharmaceutical industry has a wasteful problem. Over 10 per cent of products are slow moving or completely stagnant… Furthermore, healthcare providers are looking forward to lowering their costs and to enforcing more transpar

As more and more industries use complex technologies, their designers see the need to adopt systems that continue to function even if a component fails – an adoption that promises to be made considerably easier by the work of AMATISTA.

The IST project AMATISTA resulted in the development of what are possibly the first automatic fault tolerance (FT) insertion and simulation tools for the computer-aided design (CAD) of integrated circuits, or microchips. Now, some of the project partners are

Researchers in North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today’s high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.

The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined

A computer-aided approach — based on software-that-learns — promises to provide a new tool that helps doctors tailor the dosage of abciximab, a medicine frequently used before angioplasty to lessen the chance of heart attack.

Dr. Mirna Urquidi-Macdonald, professor of engineering science and mechanics, says, “While we tried our approach first with abciximab, it may be applicable to other medicines that have a narrow therapeutical range between under dosing and overdosing.”

The appr

Physicists in New Zealand have shown that last November’s record-breaking solar explosion was much larger than previously estimated, thanks to innovative research using the upper atmosphere as a gigantic x-ray detector. Their findings have been accepted for 17 March publication in Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

On 4 November 2003, the largest solar flare ever recorded exploded from the Sun’s surface, sending an intense burst of radiation

On Friday, 12 March 2004, the Sun ejected a spectacular ’eruptive prominence’ into the heliosphere. SOHO, the ESA/NASA solar watchdog observatory, faithfully recorded the event.

This ’eruptive prominence’ is a mass of relatively cool plasma, or ionised gas. We say ’relatively’ cool, because the plasma observed by the Extreme-ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on board SOHO was only about 80 000 degrees Celsius, compared to the plasma at one or two milli

Talk about precision. New measurements of key wavelengths of ultraviolet light — down to a few millionths of a nanometer — are among the most precise ever reported and are improving calibrations of microlithography tools used in making integrated circuits such as those in computer chips.

The dimensions involved are 10,000 times smaller than hydrogen atoms, the smallest of all atoms.

To make the measurements, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technolo

ESA PR 15-2004. Today the Rosetta Science Working Team has made the final selection of the asteroids that Rosetta will observe at close quarters during its journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Steins and Lutetia lie in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Rosetta’s scientific goals always included the possibility of studying one or more asteroids from close range. However, only after Rosetta’s launch and its insertion into interplanetary orbit could the

Picturing complex data may become considerably easier as a solution to display combined information from multiple data formats, currently applied to biomedicine, emerges.

In November 2003, partners in the IST project MULTIMOD succeeded in registering and animating the bone model of a young patient. They developed the DataManager system, whereby the 3D bone models, as derived from CT data, were registered and animated with kinematical data derived from the patient’s gait analysis (walking m