The fate of Beagle 2 remains uncertain this morning after the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, UK, failed in its first attempt to detect any signal from the spacecraft.

Scientists were hopeful that the 250 ft (76 m) Lovell Telescope, recently fitted with a highly sensitive receiver, would be able to pick up the outgoing call from the Mars lander between 19.00 GMT and midnight last night. An attempt to listen out for Beagle’s call home by the Westerbork telescope array in th

Convergent technology is one thing – but using your computer’s printer to make a new TV screen?

Not quite, but close. In a breakthrough for low-cost electronics manufacturing, researchers at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Xerox subsidiary, have successfully created a transistor array of the type used to control a flat-panel display using a modified ink-jet printer and semiconductor “ink.” Still under development, the technique is expected to dramatically lower the cost of t

Physicists from the University of Liège in Belgium have succeeded in creating antibubbles (the exact opposite of bubbles) in one of Belgium’s most famous exports – beer – demonstrating what British real-ale drinkers have claimed for a long time: that Belgian beer actually is a lot like dish-water!

Research to be published today in the New Journal of Physics (NJP) reveals for the first time how antibubbles form and move through a liquid. Antibubbles are the exact opposite of bubbles and move

New Portraits of Spiral Galaxies NGC 613, NGC 1792 and NGC 3627

Not so long ago, the real nature of the “spiral nebulae”, spiral-shaped objects observed in the sky through telescopes, was still unknown. This long-standing issue was finally settled in 1924 when the famous American astronomer Edwin Hubble provided conclusive evidence that they are located outside our own galaxy and are in fact “island universes” of their own.

Nowadays, we know that the Milky Way is just one

An instrument aboard NASA’s recently launched orbiting infrared observatory has found evidence of organic molecules in an enormously powerful galaxy some 3.25 billion light years from the Earth. So powerful is the source, that it is equal to 10 trillion times the luminosity of the sun, making it one of the brightest galaxies ever detected.

The instrument on the newly named Spitzer Space Telescope (previously called the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, or SIRTF) is the infrared spectr

After a joint journey of 250 million miles (400 million km), the British-built Beagle 2 spacecraft and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter should now have parted and gone their separate ways.

At 8.31 GMT, software on Mars Express was scheduled to send the command for the Beagle 2 lander to separate from the orbiter. This would fire a pyrotechnic device that would slowly release a loaded spring and gently push Beagle 2 away from the mother spacecraft at around 1 ft/s (0.3 m/s).

On January 2nd 2004 the NASA space mission, STARDUST, will fly through comet Wild 2, capturing interstellar particles and dust and returning them to Earth in 2006. Space scientists from the Open University and University of Kent have developed one of the instruments which will help tell us more about comets and the evolution of our own solar system and, critical for STARDUST, its survival in the close fly-by of the comet.

Launched in February 1999, STARDUST is the first mission designed to b

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council has today announced GBP 16 million to create a massive computing Grid, equivalent to the world’s second largest supercomputer after Japan’s Earth Simulator computer. This Grid, known as GridPP2 will eventually form part of a larger European Grid, to be used to process the data deluge from CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, when its new facility, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), comes online in 2007.

GridPP is a collaboration of

Launched on 2 June 2003, after a six-month cruise at an average speed of about 10 kilometres per second and covering a distance of about 400 million kilometres, ESA’s Mars Express will arrive at Mars on Christmas Day.

After a very complicated and challenging series of operations during the night of 24/25 December 2003, the probe will be injected into an elliptical orbit near the poles of the Red Planet, while the Beagle 2 lander – released from the mother craft six days earlier – is exp

The ink was hardly dry on his new contract as assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh, when Nelson Tansu announced a breakthrough in his research into high-performance lasers.

In two recent issues of Applied Physics Letters (APL) – on July 7 and Sept. 29, Tansu and other collaborating researchers reported the best threshold values to date for near-infrared-range (with an emission wavelength of 1300-nm), indium-gallium-arsenide-nitride (InGaAsN) lasers emitting fr

Shadows are extremely important in making the graphics in 3D games and Virtual Reality applications seem natural. Soft shadows in real-time applications has largely been an unsolved problem, but now an algorithm is being introduced that will solve the problem and open many possibilities.

In his doctoral dissertation, Ulf Assarsson at the Department of Computer Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden, presents a newly developed algorithm that can create shadows of

Using a method usually more suitable to billiards than atomic physics, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and Columbia University have created extremely cold molecules that could be used as the first step in creating Bose-Einstein molecular condensates. The work is published in the Dec. 12 Science.

The serendipitous achievement came when researchers at Sandia’s Livermore, Calif., and Columbia University, studying collisional energy transfer between a beam of atoms intersecting a

ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has returned tantalising new data about the nature of the Universe. In a survey of distant clusters of galaxies, XMM-Newton has found puzzling differences between today’s clusters of galaxies and those present in the Universe around seven thousand million years ago. Some scientists claim that this can be interpreted to mean that the ’dark energy’ which most astronomers now believe dominates the Universe simply does not exist…

Observati

In a unique experiment, five of the world’s fastest supercomputers, including Daresbury Laboratory-based HPCx, have been linked together into a seamless ‘Grid’ for the first time. This computational feat was matched by the unprecedented scale of the interactive calculation then carried out on this Grid, involving thousands of visualisations of around ten million times the amount of data used to play a typical home computer game. Once analysed, the data could help solve industrial problems and revolu

Recent nanotechnology research at Purdue University could pave the way toward faster computer memories and higher density magnetic data storage, all with an affordable price tag.

Just like the electronics industry, the data storage industry is on the move toward nanoscale. By shrinking components to below 1/10,000th the width of a human hair, manufacturers could make faster computer chips with more firepower per square inch. However, the technology for making devices in that size ran

Astrobiologists disagree about whether advanced life is common or rare in our universe. But new research suggests that one thing is pretty certain – if an Earthlike world with significant water is needed for advanced life to evolve, there could be many candidates.

In 44 computer simulations of planet formation near a sun, astronomers found that each simulation produced one to four Earthlike planets, including 11 so-called “habitable” planets about the same distance from their stars as Earth