Two billion years ago, in a far-away galaxy, a giant star exploded, releasing almost unbelievable amounts of energy as it collapsed to a black hole. The light from that explosion finally reached Earth at 6:37 a.m. EST on March 29, igniting a frenzy of activity among astronomers worldwide. This phenomenon has been called a hypernova, playing on the name of the supernova events that mark the violent end of massive stars.

With two telescopes separated by about 110 degrees longitude, the Roboti

If your computer screen is covered with Web browser windows to let you monitor the news headlines, weather, traffic and stock market while you work, you might be suffering from information overload.

Computing researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology experienced this problem and have created a prototype software program to move such information from the center of your awareness to the periphery. Called InfoCanvas, the program creates an abstract pictorial representation of informat

A bit of Earth-bound chemistry has led scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, to conclude that there is an unsuspected wind of low-energy cosmic ray particles blowing through the galaxy.

The cosmic rays aren’t energetic enough to make headway against the solar wind to reach Earth, but they appear to have a big impact on the chemistry within tenuous clouds of gas between stars, so-called diffuse interstellar clouds.

“This implies a new population of cosmic rays no

New physical phenomenon will likely impact atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology

In a discovery that is likely to impact fields as diverse as atomic physics, chemistry and nanotechnology, researchers have identified a new physical phenomenon, electrostatic rotation, that, in the absence of friction, leads to spin. Because the electric force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, this leap forward in understanding may help reveal how the smallest building blocks in nature r

Andrei Linde lauds the new era of precision cosmology

For most of us, “inflation” is a term that comes up only in conversations about the economy or flat tires. But for many cosmologists, inflation is the ultimate word in understanding how the universe was created.

In the beginning, according to inflation theory, the universe was tinier than an atom. Then, in an unimaginably brief period of time – .00000000000000000000000000000001 second, to be precise – it expanded (“inflat

’Hamlet’ algorithm answers the question: ’To buy, or not to buy?’

It’s a classic dilemma for air travelers in today’s world of wildly varying ticket prices – should you purchase now if the rate seems reasonable, or wait for a better deal and take the risk that the price will go up?

Researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California appear to have taken out some of the uncertainty with a new computer program tha

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is a mysterious place. Its thick atmosphere is rich in organic compounds. Some of them would be signs of life if they were on our planet. How do they form on Titan? Will they help us to discover how life began on Earth?

ESA’s Huygens probe, arriving at Titan in 2005, will help find answers. Here on Earth, ground-based telescopes are playing their part also. They will help scientists to decide how and where precisely Huygens will land. What will it be –

Black holes really are holes – objects without a surface – say Drs Christine Done and Marek Gierlinski in a paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Having an “event horizon” rather than a surface is the property that makes something a black hole but, by definition, it’s impossible ever to see one directly. However, these new results give direct evidence of the existence of such holes in spacetime.

Drs Done and Gierlinski set out to track

Though Einstein put his foot down and demanded that nothing can move faster than light, a new device developed at the University of Rochester may let you outpace a beam by putting your foot down on the gas pedal. At 127 miles per hour, the light in the new device travels more than 5 million times slower than normal as it passes through a ruby just a few centimeters long.

Instead of the complex, room-filling mechanisms previously used to slow light, the new apparatus is small and, in the wor

Most people are familiar with the fact that sensitive instruments known as seismographs can detect earthquakes taking place many hundreds or thousands of miles away. By studying the waves from these tremors, scientists can find out about the conditions deep inside our rocky planet.

In the same way, astronomers are now able to measure millions of sound waves that propagate throughout the Sun, causing it to vibrate or ring like a bell. This technique, known as helioseismology, is the solar eq

In January 2002, a moderately dim star in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn, suddenly became 600 000 times more luminous than our Sun. This made it temporarily the brightest star in our Milky Way. The light from this eruption created a unique phenomenon known as a ’light echo’ when it reflected off dust shells around the star.

The brightness of V838 Monocerotis, as astronomers call the star, has long since returned to normal levels. Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space

Early on the morning of 30 June 1908, the vast forest of western Siberia was illuminated by a strange apparition: an alien object streaking across the cloudless sky. White hot from its headlong plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere, the intruder exploded about 8 km above the ground, flattening trees over an area of 2000 square kilometres.

Despite the huge detonation, equivalent to a 10 megaton nuclear warhead (about 500 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb), there were few if any casu

Dramatic images reveal unique star explosion

In the early months of 2002, astronomers scanning the sky saw something highly unusual – and they still don’t know exactly what it is. A star suddenly flashed to 600,000 times its previous brightness. For a brief time, it was the brightest star in the galaxy.

As the light from the outburst spread into space, it reflected from surrounding rings of dust to reveal a spectacular, multicolored bull’s eye that is now 3 light

Intelligent environment learns and is technically interactive

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, has developed technology which operates through people’s gestures. The new concept is currently being introduced for research purposes at Italdesign-Giugiaro S. p.a. the Italian car design firm. The same technology is used in wireless terminal equipment user interface research in the Netherlands at the Philips research centre HomeLab.
This VTT technology known as gesture inter

Intricate patterns formed by granular materials under the influence of electrostatic fields have scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory dreaming of new ways to create smaller structures for nanotechnologies. With a combination of electric fields and fluid mixtures, researchers Igor Aronson, Maksim Sapozhnikov, Yuri Tolmachev and Wai Kwok can cause tiny spheres of bronze and other metals to self-assemble into crystalline patterns, honeycombs, pulsating rings and

Supermassive black holes, notorious for ripping apart and swallowing stars, might also help seed interstellar space with the elements necessary for life, such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and iron, scientists say.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, scientists at Penn State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found evidence of high-speed winds blowing away copious amounts of gas from the cores of two quasar galaxies, which are