A huge solenoid, which will hold the world record of stored energy

The first module of the five constituting the CMS superconducting magnet is sailing on January 21st of from Genova port to Cern. CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is one of the experiments that will take place at the accelerator Lhc (Large Hadron Collider), under construction at Cern in Geneva. The device will arrive after a 10-days travel. One of the most ambitious goals of CMS is to provide information about the elusive H

Powerful computer simulation tools have been developed to assist doctors in diagnosis, pre-operation planning and surgery. So powerful in fact that many of these tools cannot be run efficiently on normal computers. The Grid, however, is much more than a normal desktop – it is a vast interconnected collection of computers, programmes and people. And the IST project GEMSS is harnessing the Grid’s processing power to place it in the hands of medical practitioners.

The GEMSS project plans t

Scientists at the University of Sussex have produced synthetic ‘cosmic dust’ to help space researchers understand information gathered by a mission to Saturn.

CASSINI, an unmanned probe launched by NASA in October 1997, is due to go into orbit around Saturn this summer. One of the aims of the CASSINI mission is to study the planet’s famous rings. It is already recognised Saturn’s rings are made of cosmic dust, but very little is known about the composition of the dust.

Cosmic dust

Tumatxa is a web application that handles Translation Memories. It has been created by CodeSyntax(http://www.codesyntax.com/en ), a Basque company working with free software and language technologies. The application can be tested on our website http://www.tumatxa.com where two online demos are also available.

What are translation memories?

Translation Memory or TM is a technology widely used in professional translation and localization (unlike machine translation). The idea

This time next year, ESA’s Huygens spaceprobe will be descending through the atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon, becoming the first spacecraft to land on a body in the outer Solar System.

Earlier this month, the giant ringed planet Saturn was closer to Earth than it will be for the next thirty years. All the planets orbit the Sun as if on a giant racetrack, travelling in the same direction but in different lanes.

Those in the outer lanes have further to travel than those on the in

A tiny, novel device for generating tunable microwave signals has been developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Described in the Jan. 16 issue of Physical Review Letters, the device measures just a few micro-meters square and is hundreds of times smaller than typical microwave signal generators in use today in cell phones, wireless Internet devices, radar systems and other applications.

The device works by exploiting the fact that individual elec

ESA’s Mars Express, successfully inserted into orbit around Mars on 25 December 2003, is about to reach its final operating orbit above the poles of the Red Planet. The scientific investigation has just started and the first results already look very promising.

Although the seven scientific instruments on board Mars Express are still undergoing a thorough calibration phase, they have already started collecting amazing results. The first high-resolution images and spectra of Mars have al

A “robot scientist” that generates hypotheses about the function of particular genes in baker’s yeast – and then designs and carries out experiments to test them – has been developed by a team of British scientists, according to new research published in the journal Nature today [15 January 2004].

“This research is very exciting as we have given the robot – under our supervision – the ability to design the experiments and interpret the data for us,” says Professor Ross King from the Univers

A new tool developed under the IST CROSSGRID project aims to make running applications over the distributed computing environment of the Grid even easier. It currently is being used to help predict flooding across Europe.

Led by the Polish supercomputing institute Cyfronet, 21 partners in 11 countries across Europe are working to extend the Grid environment to a new category of practical applications. One of the key tools they have developed is the migration desktop, which is designed to sup

Scientists using CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array, a radio synthesis telescope in New South Wales, Australia, have seen a neutron star spitting out a jet of matter at very close to the speed of light. This is the first time such a fast jet has been seen from anything other than a black hole.

The discovery, reported in this week’s issue of ’Nature’, challenges the idea that only black holes can create the conditions needed to accelerate jets of particles to extreme speeds.

Frozen helium-4 behaves like a combination of solid and superfluid

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University are announcing the possible discovery of an entirely new phase of matter: an ultra-cold, “supersolid” form of helium-4.

Writing in the 15 January 2004 issue of the journal Nature, Penn State physicist Moses H. W. Chan and his graduate student, Eun-Seong Kim, explain that their material is a solid in the sense that all its helium-4 atoms are frozen into a rigid

Previously unseen details of a mysterious, complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), also called the ’Keyhole Nebula’, are revealed by this image obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The picture is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different colour filters.
The picture is dominated by a large, approximately circular feature, about 7 light-years acro

An international team of scientists working in the UK, Australia, Italy and the USA has made an astronomical discovery that has major implications for testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Using the 64-m CSIRO Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia, the team recently detected the first system of two pulsars orbiting each other – the only system of its kind found so far among the 1400-plus pulsars discovered in the last 35 years.

Team member Dr. Richard

A key objective of the ongoing EU Grid programme is to make available large-scale, distributed resources capable of solving complex processing problems. The environment, energy, health, transport and industrial design are all likely application areas. At the end of 2003 the Grid infrastructure is already a reality, interconnecting national research networks in Europe and across the world. The next question is – how do researchers access and use this huge resource?

One of largest research

The first 360-degree color view from NASA’s Spirit Mars Exploration Rover presents a range of tempting targets from nearby rocks to hills on the horizon.

“The whole panorama is there before us,” said rover science- team member Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. “It’s a great opening to the next stage of our mission.”

Spirit’s flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., continues making progress toward getting the

The University team of 14 is part of a group of 300 physicists from 13 countries known as the ‘Belle collaboration’. They have discovered a sub-atomic particle that they are having difficulty explaining and difficulty fitting with any current theory that attempts to describe matter.

Their research will be published in Physical Review Letters (in press).

“It could mean some of the standard and accepted theories on matter will need to be modified to incorporate some new physics,” sa