Astronomers today unveiled the deepest portrait of the visible Universe ever achieved by humankind. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called ’dark ages’, the time shortly after the ’Big Bang’ when the first stars reheated the cold, dark Universe. The new image should offer unprecedented insights into what types of objects reheated the Universe long ago.

This historic new view is actually made up by t

Experts at the University of Leicester working with a Northampton company have made a breakthrough in developing a computerised system for ear image and ear print identification, for use by police agencies, immigration and intelligence services.

The Forensic Pathology Unit, University of Leicester, in conjunction with K9 Forensic Services Limited, Northampton, England, have developed what they believe to be the first computerised system for ear image and ear print identification. This system

Leading the way in real-time image processing are two spin-off companies whose state-of-the-art microprocessors are opening up a new range of applications in areas as broad as communications, manufacturing and the military.

Inspired by the workings of the human eye, the IST project DICTAM developed a series of mixed-signal visual microprocessors that are among the fastest and most complex ever created, capable of processing up to 50,000 images per second. Baptised by the project partners as

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a space observatory dedicated to X-ray astronomy. Launched on July 23rd, 1999, this X-ray telescope is particularly dedicated to the observation of high-energy sources in the universe. It has also been used to study the following solar system objects: the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and even the Comet C/1999 S4 LINEAR.

Using Chandra, J.-U. Ness and his colleagues detected an unambiguous X-ray emission from the planet Saturn for the first time. A few years a

Ann Nguyen chose a risky project for her graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A university team had already sifted through 100,000 grains from a meteorite to look for a particular type of stardust — without success.

In 2000, Nguyen decided to try again. About 59,000 grains later, her gutsy decision paid off. In the March 5 issue of Science, Nguyen and her advisor, Ernst K. Zinner, Ph.D., research professor of physics and of earth and planetary sciences, both in Arts & Sc

New sensor to detect computer hard drives

Carnegie Mellon University researchers have designed a new heat-sensitive sensor to detect computer hard drive failures.

The Carnegie Mellon Critter Temperature Sensor, which attaches to a user’s desktop computer, is being deployed across campus to monitor the working environment of university computers, according to Michael Bigrigg, a project scientist for the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES).

“Essentia

A new study by theoretical physicists at the University of Toronto and the University of California at Los Angeles (ULCA) could bring scientists one step closer to the dream of a superconductor that functions at room temperature, rather than the frigid temperatures more commonly found in deep space.

The findings, which appear in the March 4 issue of the journal Nature, identify three factors that explain a perplexing pattern in the temperatures at which multi-layered ceramic materials become

Using a British radio telescope called the Very Small Array (VSA), located on the flanks of Mount Teide in Tenerife, astronomers from the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) have made measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – radiation left over from the Big Bang – which shed new light on events in the first minute fraction of the Universe’s existence.

By combining their results with those of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwa

The need for advanced highly integrated photonic circuits stems from the capacity expansion of telecommunications infrastructures driven by ever-increasing customer demand. Novel design and manufacturing technologies for advanced photonic circuits emerging from PICCO could meet this need.

Ready for mass production

The work of the IST programme-funded project has provided evidence that functional photonic circuits can be created using state-of-the-art deep UV lithography. T

“Starry Night”, Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although this image of the heavens came only from the artist’s restless imagination, a new picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the Van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of kilometres of interstellar space.

This image, obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on 8

A voting system that encrypts data transmission to allow voters to cast their ballots in secretly and securely over the Internet was developed by TRUE-VOTE.

The goal of this IST programme-funded project was to design and implement a voting protocol based on digital signature and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), as well as to integrate the most advanced technologies in cryptography and Information and Communication Technologies to guarantee transaction security and privacy.

The pro

In the morning of March 2, the Rosetta spacecraft was launched on board an Ariane-5 launcher from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft will be the first to land on a comet.

Before the launch, and as a salute to their colleagues at ESA, astronomers used the New Technology Telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) of La Silla in Chile to image Rosetta’s target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, an approximately 4 kilometre size

Physical Review E publishes paper on fusion experiment conducted with upgraded measurement system

Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma co

The colour image (with north at the top) shows the summit caldera of Hecates Tholus, the northernmost volcano of the Elysium volcano group. The volcano reveals multiple caldera collapses. On the flanks of Hecates Tholus, several flow features related to water (lines radiating outwards) and pit chains related to lava can be observed. The volcano has an elevation of 5300 m, the caldera has a diameter of maximum 10 km and a depth of 600 m. The image centre is located at 150° East and 31.7° North.

Mysterious, powerful X-ray sources found in nearby galaxies may represent a new class of objects, according to data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. These sources, which are not as hot as typical neutron-star or black-hole X-ray sources, could be a large new population of black holes with masses several hundred times that of the sun.

“The challenge raised by the discovery of these sources is to understand how they produce so much X-ray power at temperatures of a few million degrees,”

Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias

In 1997, the three cosmologists made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist — that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it.

Hawking’s research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as th