Carbon nanotubes, recently created cylinders of tightly bonded carbon atoms, have dazzled scientists and engineers with their seemingly endless list of special abilities – from incredible tensile strength to revolutionizing computer chips. In today’s issue of Science, two University of Rochester researchers add another feat to the nanotubes’ list: ideal photon emission.

“The emission bandwidth is as narrow as you can get at room temperature,” says Lukas Novotny, professor of

UCLA astronomers report they have detected remarkably stormy conditions in the hot plasma being pulled into the monstrous black hole residing at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light years away. This detection of the hot plasma is the first in an infrared wavelength, where most of the disturbed plasma’s energy is emitted, and was made using the 10-meter Keck II Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Plasma is a hot, ionized, gas-like matter — a fourth state of ma

Researchers studying physical and chemical processes at the smallest scales, smaller even than the width of a human hair, have found that fluid circulating in a microscopic whirlpool can reach radial acceleration more than a million times greater than gravity, or 1 million Gs.

By contrast, a pilot flying a fighter jet at high speed and in relatively tight circular patterns might experience a force of 10 to 12 Gs, making the force his body feels 10 to 12 times normal.

“From a physi

Widespread crime and the rise of global terrorism have meant that security systems need to incorporate sophisticated and rapid computer recognition of human faces, as delegates will hear next week at the British Machine Vision Conference being held at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Another side of the same coin is in making human faces that appear on computers as convincing as possible, and in particular making speech appear realistic, as a team of UEA researchers will tell the confere

NASA will use software upon completion of space station

A new software system designed by a University at Buffalo aerospace engineer will help NASA detect and find air leaks in the International Space Station.
The software will be installed in NASA’s mission control when the manned space station is expanded from its current eight-module configuration to its final 15-module configuration, according to John L. Crassidis, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineer

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study of Jupiter’s moon Europa may help explain the origin of the giant ice domes peppering its surface and the implications for discovering evidence of past or present life forms there.

Assistant Professor Robert Pappalardo and doctoral student Amy Barr previously believed the mysterious domes may be formed by blobs of ice from the interior of the frozen shell that were being pushed upward by thermal upwelling from warmer ice underneath. Europa

The latest discovery of a large asteroid moving through our Solar System puts a spotlight on the studies of these and other wandering celestial objects by the European Space Agency.

Some astronomers have predicted that this newly discovered object could hit the Earth on 21 March, 2014, but now data indicate that the chances of it doing so are really very small – less than one in 909,000.

However, scientists continue to monitor these objects which could give clues to the orig

Evolution Robotics ER Vision™ Software to be licensed by Entertainment Robot Company – ERC – a Division of Sony Corporation

Evolution Robotics™ Inc., a leading provider of state-of-the-art robotics solutions, today announced a technology licensing agreement with Entertainment Robot Company – ERC – a division of Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE). Evolution Robotics will work closely with Sony ERC to optimize ER Vision™ for use in future Sony ERC products.

Sony chose to work with Ev

Rensselaer Researchers Pioneer Interconnect Technology that May Take Chips Into 3-D

Researchers led by Ronald J. Gutmann in the Focus Center-New York at Rensselaer (FC-NY-RPI) are pioneering new interconnect technologies that promise to deliver smaller, faster, inexpensive, microelectronics and circuits that function in three dimensions.

Researchers at Rensselaer’s Focus Center-NY for Interconnections for Gigascale Integration believe that a strategy in which several chip wa

Imagine shopping online for the perfect back-to-school outfit. You can see the colour and size and perhaps the texture of the fabric, but can you tell how it will look from different perspectives under fluorescent classroom lighting? “The material might be very beautiful but a potential customer wouldn’t know that because the image gives a grossly incomplete sense of texture,” says Alex Vasilescu, a doctoral candidate at U of T’s Department of Computer Science. The software she has

Scientific breakthrough in the transmutation of isotopes

Collaboration between the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) DG, the University of Jena (Germany), the University of Strathclyde (UK), Imperial College (UK), and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK) has led to the transmutation of long-lived radioactive iodine-129 into short-lived iodine-128 using very high intensity laser radiation. Until recently, transmutation could only be achieved in nuclear reactors or p

Chemists and computer scientists are using a special facility at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to scale molecules up for people-sized interactions. Using chemical data, NIST software, special eyewear, and floor-to-ceiling display screens, they create giant three-dimensional molecules that move. Molecular behavior can be seen and understood in minutes instead of the weeks required using traditional techniques.

NIST scientists and collaborators used the 3D facility

The DC303.8-14.2 globule

A small and dark interstellar cloud with the rather cryptic name of DC303.8-14.2 is located in the inner part of the Milky Way galaxy. It is seen in the southern constellation Chamaeleon and consists of dust and gas. Astronomers classify it as a typical example of a “globule”.

As many other globules, this cloud is also giving birth to a star. Some years ago, observations in the infrared spectral region with the ESA IRAS satellite observatory detecte

11.8T HP supercomputer with Intel Itanium2 processors running Linux reaches full operations.

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is now home to the United States’ fastest operational unclassified supercomputer. The laboratory’s 11.8 teraflops industry-standard HP Integrity system came to full operating power this week, marking the next advance in high-performance computing designed to enable new insights in the environmental and molecular sciences, includ

As Mars makes its closest approach in almost 60,000 years, two Australian astronomers have used the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii to look for signs that the planet once had liquid water – and so may have hosted life.

Dr. Jeremy Bailey of the Anglo-Australian Observatory and the Australian Centre for Astrobiology (ACA) at Macquarie University in Sydney, and Sarah Chamberlain, a PhD student at the ACA, have produced what is Bailey says is “perhaps the sharpest image of Ma

Understanding the physics of granular materials is important in industries that handle and process large amounts of the materials, such as pills and powders in the pharmaceutical and food industries and sand in the construction business.

But the problem of how to model granular materials has perplexed physicists. In particular, they’d like to better understand how the temperature within an assemblage of granular material affects the system’s dynamics. That understanding will help