A project between academia and industry is aiming to spark a world electronics revolution by producing faster, cheaper and more reliable microchips.

The University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, has joined forces with Amtel, on North Tyneside in the North East of England, to create ‘strained silicon’ microchips, which involves adding a material called germanium to the traditional silicon used in semiconductor manufacturing.

Atmel, whose silicon chips find applications in such diverse

It’s an all-too-common experience – the perfect photograph ruined by the demonic glow of the “red-eye” effect. Now, a researcher at the University of Toronto has developed a method that can automatically remove those unsightly scarlet spots from digital images.

“The technique will offer consumers a convenient, automatic tool for eliminating red-eye in digital photographs,” says Professor Konstantinos Plataniotis of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Ultrafast lasers helping to make some of the shortest pulses of light ever seen in the UK will be at the heart of a new system to capture the movements of electrons as they whizz around the nucleus of atoms.

A UKP3.5 million research grant from the UK Research Councils’ Basic Technology Programme announced today has been awarded to a team of scientists to develop and build the first attosecond laser system capable of freeze-framing and controlling the motion of electrons.

Researcher

Subaru and VLT Join Forces in New Study of Virgo Galaxy Cluster

At a distance of some 50 million light-years, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest galaxy cluster. It is located in the zodiacal constellation of the same name (The Virgin) and is a large and dense assembly of hundreds of galaxies.

The “intracluster” space between the Virgo galaxies is permeated by hot X-ray emitting gas and, as has become clear recently, by a sparse “intracluster population of stars”.

So fa

To be able to detect gravitation waves in space, physicist have to measure truly minimal displacements: ten billion times smaller than the size of an atom. An improved superconducting sensor is a suitable candidate for this job, Martin Podt of the University of Twente now states in his PhD thesis. He has improved the sensitivity of a so-called ‘SQUID’ in way that it can be combined with a large ball-shaped gravitation detector. Podt succeeds in this by improving the sensitivity. He integrates the sen

Scientists who built and will control the instruments to investigate plasma changes around a comet describe their contribution to the ten year long mission at a pre-launch press briefing in London.

While the actual launch date for the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission has yet to be confirmed, the scientists, engineers and technicians behind the plasma-detecting instruments on board the spacecraft are all ready to begin the journey to comet Wirtanen they hope will return a r

Researchers at the University of Rochester have uncovered how giant magnetic fields up to a billion, billion miles across, such as the one that envelopes our galaxy, are able to take shape despite a mystery that suggested they should collapse almost before they’d begun to form. Astrophysicists have long believed that as these large magnetic fields grow, opposing small-scale fields should grow more quickly, thwarting the evolution of any giant magnetic field. The team discovered instead that the

Finnish Miotec has increased smartcard security through biometrics, which uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual.

Biometric technology uses physical characteristics, such as fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice to identify an individual. In traditional biometric technology, the biometric information was stored in databases or readers. Not only was this exposing the secure information to hacking, but was considered a violati

A new type of star has been discovered lurking as a low mass component in a very compact binary star system.

Astronomers Steve B. Howell of the University of California, Riverside and Tom Harrison of New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, announced today at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Seattle, Wash., that they have confirmed the existence of a new variety of stellar end-product. This previously unknown type of star has some properties similar to brown dwarf stars and may

Which way does a mammoth skeleton point in Siberia? No, it’s not a Christmas cracker joke. To find the answer you have to look in a rather surprising place – the Institute of Physics’ new online archive.

In an article published in the first edition of Proceedings of the Physical Society in 1874, John Rae writes about the physical properties of ice and mammoth remains. He put forward a theory as to why so many of the mammoth skeletons found near the Yenesei river in Siberia had been found wi

Using a state-of-the-art computer model of the lunar interior, geophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that a mighty burp early in the moon’s history could account for some of its geologic mysteries.

The burp of hot rock, like a blob rising to the top of a lava lamp, would have lifted a blanket covering the moon’s core, allowing the core to cool quickly enough to produce a magnetic field.

The moon has long since cooled off and the global magne

A study at Ohio State University has uncovered more evidence that black holes form before the galaxies that contain them.

The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate, said Marianne Vestergaard, a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Ohio State.

Vestergaard came to this conclusion when she studied a collection of very energetic, active galaxies known as quasars as they appeared some 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only one billion years old. While the quasars wer

In results presented this week at the 2003 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, astrophysicist Greg Aldering and colleagues report that their supernova factory project has discovered an unprecedented 34 new supernovae in its first year. The accomplishment would not have been possible without the National Science Foundation (NSF) – supported high performance wireless network link to Palomar Observatory. “This has been the best rookie year for any supernova search pro

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astronomers are major partners in a scientific collaboration that will conduct an extremely novel search for small, comet-like bodies in the outer solar system using four half-meter telescopes. The work was described today at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Rather than look for the light reflected directly by these objects (as is customary astronomy practice), this project will search for those very rare moments when one of these ob

When Earth’s sun expands into a red giant star in roughly five billion years, long after Earth has become uninhabitable, the hydrogen core will be burned out and the bloated outer shell will be cool and murky.

But according to new research by the University of Colorado at Boulder, such red giants still retain surface magnetic storms and coronas — the very hot and patchy outer atmosphere of the sun and sun-like stars — at temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit that often signal

One and a half billion years ago the small, inconspicuous galaxy Messier 82 (M82) almost smashed into its large, massive neighbour galaxy Messier 81 (M81), causing a frenzy of star formation.

New research by astronomers from the Universities of Cambridge and Utrecht, Netherlands, has now discovered an elusive phenomenon in this violent “starburst” area. About 100 star clusters have been discovered that are believed to be the ancestors of the so-called “globular clusters” thought to be the ol