Wavelet bootstrapping

For certain classes of data that may be very expensive or difficult to obtain, a new statistical technique may provide useful information from a single data run by allowing meaningful re-sampling.

The technique, known as “wavelet bootstrapping” or “wavestrapping,” has applications in the geophysical sciences, bioinformatics, medical imaging, nanotechnology and other areas. It can also be useful for rapidly obtaining information from small data sets in s

A snowboarder’s dream come true: THE HUB, a ’wearable electronics’ jacket wired for both sound and mobile telephony capable of withstanding the most radical snowboarding environment.

Designed by Infineon Technologies and O’Neill Europe (a leading high-quality sports wear and gear producer), THE HUB incorporates technology resulting from initial research done under the European Commission’s ESPRIT and IST research programmes.

“The success of wearable electr

E-commerce makes it possible for a customer to order a mix of books, CDs and videos which will be shipped within 48 hours. Increasing “B2C” (business-to-customer) e-commerce and other ordering methods requires a new mailing and packaging philosophy. The partners in EUREKA project E! 2550 MAILPACK have developed a new mail management and packaging system to meet this challenge.

“Currently such orders are fulfilled by hand, or semi-automatic systems,” explains Ad Linssen, Financial Manager at

Thirty years ago the determination of a protein structure required years of effort and typically was sufficient for a Ph.D. thesis. Today, due to advances in synchrotron X-ray sources and detectors, protein crystal structures can be calculated in just hours, “enabling many types of studies that were previously inconceivable,” according to a leading researcher at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Sol Gruner, a Cornell physics professor and an expert in designing and building fast, large-area

You would imagine that a 500,000 kilometre long arch of super heated plasma releasing energy equal to the simultaneous explosion of 40 billion Hiroshima atomic bombs would be as easy to “hear” as it is to “see” – but it’s not. Astrophysicists have long thought about using the acoustic waves in these flares to understand more about these gigantic events, that can be dozens of times bigger than the Earth, but have been unable to use effectively up till now. Now researchers at the University of Warwick,

NSF sensors activities in focus at AAAS annual meeting in Seattle

In the 1990s, the Internet connected us to a planet-wide web of information-all the zillions of bits that are stored in computer memories and hard drives. But now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in highly miniaturized, wirelessly networked sensors, the Internet is reaching out into the physical world, as well.

“We call it ’the Embedding of the Internet’,” says Deborah Estrin, who is a computer scien

Security mechanisms also must protect what goes out

Passwords to guard entry aren’t enough to protect complex data – security mechanisms also must protect what goes out

“Data can easily find itself in danger of being accessed by ’bad guys,’” says emeritus professor of computer science Gio Wiederhold, who will speak about trusted information databases Feb. 14 in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “Pa

Equipped with cutting-edge techniques to track the activity of tens of thousands of genes in a single experiment, biologists now face a new challenge – determining how to analyze this tidal wave of data. Stanford Associate Professor of Computer Science Daphne Koller and her colleagues have come to the rescue with a strategic approach that reduces the trial-and-error aspect of genetic sequence analysis.

’’What we’re developing is a suite of computational tools that take reams

Neutrinos are about the tiniest things in existence, but developing a greater understanding of what they are and how they function is likely to have a huge impact in the next few years.

The subatomic particles, created in the nuclear furnaces of the sun and other stars, have no electrical charge and only recently has it been found that they have any mass at all, yet billions pour through each human body every second with no discernable effect or interaction.

Still, the very slight

After a 7-year interplanetary voyage, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will reach Saturn this July and begin what promises to be one of the most exciting missions in planetary exploration history.

After years of work, scientists have just completed plans for Cassini’s observations of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

“Of course, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Ralph Lorenz, an assistant research scientist at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Plan

A spectroscopy technique that offers advances in detection of toxic chemicals and counting of molecules has been demonstrated by a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientist and collaborators. Described in the Feb. 8 issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics, the NIST-patented technique may be useful for development of miniaturized chemical sensors, as well as for fundamental surface science studies.

The technique (a variation on cavity ring-down spectroscopy) relies on

An international team of astronomers may have set a new record in discovering what is the most distant known galaxy in the Universe. Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the Universe was barely 5 percent of its current age.

The primeval galaxy was identified by combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and CARA’s W. M. Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. These great obs

In these days of heightened security and precautions, surveillance cameras watching over us as we cross darkened parking lots or looking over our shoulders at airports may seem reassuring, but they’re only of use if someone is watching them. Researchers at the University of Rochester’s computer science laboratories have found a way to give these cameras a rudimentary brain to keep an eye out for us, and the research is already been licensed to a Rochester company with an aim toward homeland security.

Looking into the night sky you may see a few stars and the moon. Astronomers, however, are looking for more than this – they are looking for Earth-like planets, which, with a little help from Cranfield University, they may be able to find.

As part of a four-year collaborative project, Cranfield University professors Paul Shore, Dave Stephenson and John Nicholls, together with Dr David Walker and Dr Peter Doel, both of University College London, and OpTIC Technium, are set to establish a uniq

Research using M&Ms sheds light on particle-packing problem

For most people, a regular lunch of M&M’s and coffee would lead to no good. For Princeton physicist Paul Chaikin and collaborators, it spurred fundamental insights into an age-old problem in mathematics and physics.

Chaikin and Princeton chemist Salvatore Torquato used the candies to investigate the physical and mathematical principles that come into play when particles are poured randomly into a vessel. While

Like the delicate form of an icicle defying gravity during a spring thaw, patterns emerge in nature when forces compete. Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found a hidden pattern in cuprate (copper-containing) superconductors that may help explain high-temperature superconductivity.

Superconductivity, the complete loss of electrical resistance in some materials, occurs at temperatures near absolute zero. First observed in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlin