Computer modeling and simulation programs that depict predisaster site conditions, changes due to sudden life-threatening events and consequences of emergency responses can be powerful tools for preparing for and coping with everything from terrorist attacks to hurricanes. Yet the multitude of programs, incompatibility of systems as well as technical jargon in the programs themselves hinder widespread acceptance of the potentially life-saving technology. The National Institute of Standards and Techn

To enhance SMEs’ competitiveness in European shoe production, SHOENET is developing a design and management platform that is easily integrated and implemented.

Preliminary analysis by the two-year IST programme funded-project found that one of the main reasons that SMEs, well represented in countries like Italy and Spain (which account for more than 65 per cent of European shoe production), have failed to take advantage of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools is that they hav

A National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientist has demonstrated efficient production of single photons—the smallest pulses of light—at the highest temperatures reported for the photon source used. The advance is a step toward practical, ultrasecure quantum communications, as well as useful for certain types of metrology. The results are reported in the Feb. 23 issue of Applied Physics Letters.

“Single photon turnstiles” are being hotly pursued for quantum communicatio

Redshift 10 Galaxy discovered at the edge of the Dark Ages [1]

Using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, and the magnification effect of a gravitational lens, a team of French and Swiss astronomers [2] has found several faint galaxies believed to be the most remote known.

Further spectroscopic studies of one of these candidates has provided a strong case for what is now the new record holder – and by far – of the most distant galaxy known i

Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Washington University have seen carbon and nitrogen anomalies on a particle of interplanetary dust that provides a clue as to how interstellar organic matter was incorporated into the solar system.

Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) gathered from the Earth’s stratosphere are complex collections of primitive solar system material and carry various isotopic anomalies. Using an ion microprobe that allows isotopic imaging at a scale o

For the first time, scientists from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, in conjunction with astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology, UC Santa Cruz, the National Science Foundation’s Center for Adaptive Optics and UC’s Lick Observatory, have observed that distant larger stars formed in flattened accretion disks just like the sun.

Using the laser guide star adaptive optics system created by LLNL scientists, the team was able to determine that some of the relativel

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that may be a nursery for planets.

The dim red dwarf star is a mere 33 light years away, close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics to sharpen the image should be able to see whether the dust disk contains clumps of matter that might turn into planets.

“Circumstellar disks are signposts for planet formati

Producing a material that is harder than natural diamond has been a goal of materials science for decades. Now a group headed by scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., has produced gemsized diamonds that are harder than any other crystals, available at a rate that is up to 100 times faster than other methods used to date. The process opens up an entirely new way of producing diamond crystals for electronics, cutting tools and other industrial applica

’Organic spin valves’ shown feasible for new electronic devices

University of Utah physicists have taken an important step toward a new generation of faster, cheaper computers and electronics by building the first “organic spin valves” – electrical switches that integrate two emerging fields of technology: organic semiconductor electronics and spin electronics, or spintronics.

In a study published Feb. 26 in the journal Nature, the researchers report they used a se

Content and software vendors wary of online piracy will be heartened by technology from PAIDFAIR that protects and measures IP usage for e-commerce.

The focus of the 18 month IST programme-funded project was to hold demonstrations aimed at giving trust and confidence to software and IP content vendors and users, to ultimately create an European or even worldwide standard for accounting of software and IP content use.

Project manager Oliver Winzenried says most of the project

On 26 February, Rosetta will be setting off on its long journey through our solar system to meet up with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will take the European Space Agency (ESA) space probe ten years to reach its destination.

The comet, which moves in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, will at rendezvous be some 675 million kilometres from the Sun, near the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun. The meeting point was not chosen at random: at this point the comet is still barely active,

Recording and conserving the millions of artefacts uncovered annually from excavation sites is a daunting task for archaeologists, but the 3D MURALE project has developed an integrated set of multimedia tools to help archaeologists preserve Europe’s ancient remains.

The 3D acquisition systems developed during the recently completed IST programme-funded project can measure a range of objects of different dimensions such as pottery shards and statues to produce precise, realistic-looking

Potential applications in medicine, remote sensing, imaging and satellite communications

A world that consumes information in gigabytes may one day find terahertz-sized solutions for some of its most pressing problems.

While one gigabyte is equal to one billion (109) bytes of information, a terahertz (THz) is a unit of electromagnetic-wave frequency equivalent to one trillion (1012) hertz, with one hertz equaling one cycle per second.

Terahertz (THz) frequencies, r

Scientists at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) and NASA have captured unprecedented details of the swirling flow of gas hovering just a few miles from the surface of a neutron star, itself a sphere only about ten miles across. A massive and rare explosion on the surface of this neutron star – pouring out more energy in three hours than the Sun does in 100 years – illuminated the area and allowed the scientists to spy on details of the region never before revealed. T

Since the development of superconducting electronic devices there has been a need to develop a three terminal transistor like device sensitive enough to measure small voltage and current signals typical of those associated with single electron and photon events.

A group of researchers in the Department of Particle & Nuclear Physics at Oxford University has designed a superconducting device with properties analogous to those of a traditional semiconducting transistor. The Quatratran (Quasipar

New technology developed by GE may help radiation oncologists more accurately target tumors

A new imaging technology developed by GE Medical Systems and currently being evaluated at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) may allow radiation oncologists to precisely track tumor movement and avoid excess doses of radiation for patients under treatment for cancer. Preliminary results at UPMC demonstrate that Advantage™ 4D (Adv4D) limits the exposure of radiation to healthy ti