New research on the sun’s contribution to global warming is reported in this month’s Astronomy & Geophysics. By looking at solar activity over the last 11,000 years, British Antarctic Survey (BAS) astrophysicist, Mark Clilverd, predicts that the sun’s contribution to warming the Earth will reduce slightly over the next 100 years.

This is a different picture to the last century when solar flares, sunspots and geomagnetic storms, increased in number. This rise is simultaneous with emissions of

SMART-1’’s revolutionary propulsion system was successfully fired at 12:25 UT on 30 September, 2003, in orbit around the Earth.

Engineers at ESOC, the European Space Agency’’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, sent a command to begin the firing test, which lasted for one hour. This was similar to a trial performed on Earth before SMART-1 was launched.
Several months ago, the ion engine, or Solar Electric Primary Propulsion (SEPP) system, had been placed in a vacuu

Designers of semiconductor devices are like downhill skiers – they thrive on speed. And achieving speed in the semiconductor business is all about the stuff you start with. While silicon is still the mainstay of the industry, circuit designers also would like to put materials like gallium nitride and silicon carbide into wider use. Such advanced semiconductor materials can operate at higher voltages and provide faster switching speeds, an important characteristic in determining how fast a semiconduct

Astronomers have discovered two of the smallest moons yet found around Uranus. The new moons, uncovered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are about 8 to 10 miles across (12 to 16 km) — about the size of San Francisco.

The two moons are so faint they eluded detection by the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which discovered 10 small satellites when it flew by the gas giant planet in 1986. The newly detected moons are orbiting even closer to the planet than the five major Uranian satellites, which

The world’s particle physics community today announced the launch of the first phase of the LHC computing Grid (LCG). The LCG is designed to handle the unprecedented quantities of data that will be produced by experiments at CERN ’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) from 2007 onwards. “The LCG will provide a vital test-bed for the new Grid computing technologies that are set to revolutionise the way scientists use the world’’s computing resources in areas ranging from fundamental research to

Collaborative project promises new approach to battling fires

Someday fire fighters will be able to manage wildfires by computer.

Rochester Institute of Technology recently won a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to translate remote-sensing data about wildfires into real-time “mini-movies” that fire managers can download on laptop computers at the scene of a blaze. The model and visualization will predict the fire’s behavior for the following hour.

For the first time a material now exists that is not only a semiconductor but also exhibits exploitable magnetic properties at room temperature. Researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, have taken the lead in an international race to find the technology of tomorrow.

Today’s computers process information using semiconductor chips and store it on magnetic discs. Tomorrow’s technology may mean that these parts merge into a single chip. This is based on the so

Pursuing commercialization of technologies spawned by its highly successful µChemLab(tm) project, Sandia National Laboratories is actively soliciting industry partners to license, manufacture, and sell a unique suite of microfluidic connection products.

Two distinct portfolios are being offered for licensing: The CapTite(tm) collection of capillary fittings, which is based on an exclusive one-piece ferrule; and the Chip-Tite(tm) series of manifolds and interconnects, which is fully compati

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have one-upped “smart” credit cards with embedded microchips: They’ve developed a technique that lets ordinary card users program in their own spending parameters.

Penn computer scientist Carl A. Gunter presented the work at the recent European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming in Darmstadt, Germany. The technology could let employers better manage spending on corporate cards or permit parents to get teenage children emergency credi

CSIRO has developed an Internet-based simulation tool that predicts the motion of particles inside grinding mills, providing insight into the way mills work and enabling huge energy savings from smarter, more energy efficient design.

webGF-Mill assesses the design and function of the grinding mills used at mines to crush ore.

“Improving mill design is important because of the amount of energy that mills use,” says CSIRO mathematician Dave Morton. “Typically, grinding mills are very

Elusive brown dwarfs, the missing link between gas giant planets like Jupiter and small, low-mass stars, have now been “fingerprinted” by UCLA astronomy professor Ian S. McLean and colleagues, using the Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

McLean and his research team will publish the most systematic and comprehensive near-infrared spectral analysis of more than 50 brown dwarfs in the Oct. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal, the premier journal in astronomy, publi

Configuration featuring InfiniBand architecture and PCI Express technology delivers performance breakthrough

Sandia National Laboratories today announced at the Intel Developer Forum it will demonstrate an Intel-based next-generation, High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, the first such cluster to utilize PCI Express visualization systems.

The demonstration will run PCI Express Ethernet and Graphics adapters supplied by ATI on servers supplied by Linux Networx and Celest

Revealing images produced by one of the world’s most sophisticated telescopes are enabling a team of Edinburgh astronomers to see clearly for the first time how distant galaxies were formed 12 billion years ago. Scientists from the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) and the University of Edinburgh have been targeting the biggest and most distant galaxies in the Universe with the world’s most sensitive submillimetre camera, SCUBA. The camera, built in Edinburgh, is operated on the James Clerk Ma

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist, in collaboration with international researchers, has found evidence for the synchronous formation of massive, luminous elliptical galaxies in young galaxy clusters.

The forming galaxies were detected at sub-millimeter wavelengths. Emission at these wavelengths is due to dust from young stars that is heated by the stars or by active black holes. The galaxies were grouped around high-red shift radio galaxies, the most massive systems kn

Telltale X-rays from iron may reveal if black holes are spinning or not, according to astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory. The gas flows and bizarre gravitational effects observed near stellar black holes are similar to those seen around supermassive black holes. Stellar black holes, in effect, are convenient `scale models’ of their much larger cousins.

Black holes come in at least two different sizes. Stellar black holes

Philosophical transactions a November issue

Organised and edited by Carlos Frenk, George Kalmus, Nigel Smith and Simon White

What is the universe made of? How is it expanding? What is the origin of galaxies and other cosmic large-scale structures? These questions and some tentative answers were the focus of the discussion meeting on The search for dark matter and dark energy in the Universe, held at The Royal Society on 22-23 January 2003.

Astronomers have known fo