’Hot laps’ to become yesterday’s problem

Laptops make laps hot, as users of mobile lightweight computers sometimes learn dramatically. (If you’re not easily shocked, go to http://www.reuters.com). And things could get worse: upcoming chips may produce 100 watts per square centimeter — the heat generated by a light bulb — creating the effect of an unpleasantly localized dry sauna. (Current chip emanations are in the 50 watts/cm2 range.)

Evacuating heat i

Reconnection, the merging of magnetic field lines of opposite polarity near the surface of the sun, Earth and some black holes, is believed to be the root cause of many spectacular astronomical events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, but the reason for this is not well understood. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory now have a new theory that may explain the instability and advance the understanding of these phenomena.

Theorists Giovanni Lapenta of Los Alamos Nati

Study of planetary disks around T Tauri stars

If David Weintraub and Jeff Bary are right, there may be a lot more planets circling stars like the Sun than current models of star and planet formation predict.
The associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt and his graduate student are taking a critical look at T Tauri stars. These are stellar adolescents, less than 10 million years old, which are destined to become stars similar to the Sun as they age.

Classical T Taur

The sun is healthy and strong, but physicists will have to change some of the basic assumptions they have made about how the universe works.

These are the results released today from the latest study of neutrinos made with a detector buried a half mile under a Japanese mountain. LSU physicist Bob Svoboda, who worked on an earlier ground-breaking experiment in the same mountain, was construction supervisor on this one.

Basically, scientists were trying to understand why the s

A new study led by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers indicates Mars has been primarily a cold, dry planet following its formation some 4 billion years ago, making the possibility of the evolution of life there challenging at best.

Led by CU-Boulder doctoral candidate Teresa Segura and her adviser, Professor Owen B. Toon, the team used Mars photos and computer models to show that large asteroids or comets hit the planet some 3.5 billion years ago. These impacts apparently occurre

Astronomers think big all the time: it’s their job. And on 13th December, at a meeting hosted by the Royal Astronomical Society in London, a group of them will juggle with some truly astounding large numbers. On this occasion, though, they won’t be discussing the distances to remote galaxies, but the phenomenal sizes of the telescopes they want to build so they can explore the universe to a level of detail previous generations of astronomers would never have dreamt possible. Announcing a si

At this week’s First Pan American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics in Cancun, researchers presented results on acoustic microscopy, a burgeoning technique that could provide new kinds of medically useful information on biological tissue. Unlike many other microscopy techniques, acoustical microscopy can be performed on living tissue and even inside the body, with the use of small ultrasound probes. And unlike optical microscopy of biological specimens, acoustic microscopy does not require tis sue stain

The internal state of an atom can change by absorbing or emitting bits of light. In a warm gas or plasma the electrons are frequently shuttling back and forth from one state to another. Some of these states are longer lived than others, though, because of extenuating circumstances. For instance, many transitions from an excited state to the ground state occur in nanoseconds, but some can last for tens of seconds or longer. Measuring the true lifetime of the longer-lived of these transitions is diff

New software that responds to written questions by retrieving digital images has potentially broad application, ranging from helping radiologists compare mammograms to streamlining museum curators’ archiving of artwork, say the Penn State researchers who developed the technology.

Dr. James Z. Wang, assistant professor in Penn State’s School of Information Sciences and Technology and principal investigator, says the Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures (ALIP) system first build

When it comes to miniature electronics, scientists have seen the shape of things to come — and that shape is a fractal.

People most often see fractals in the familiar, irregular branching shapes of nature — a leaf, or tree, or snowflake. A repeating pattern of ever-smaller branches gives these structures a unique profile that defies classical geometry.

Now a study suggests that magnetic fields can take the form of fractals, too — if a magnet is made of plastic molecules t

Researchers at the University of Leeds have rescued the BBC Domesday Project, preserving it for future generations. The CAMiLEON Project has developed software that emulates the obsolete BBC computer and videodisc player on which the original system ran.

The BBC Domesday project was conceived by the BBC to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the 1086 Domesday book. It formed a social snapshot of life in the UK during the mid eighties. Information was recorded on two virtually indestructible i

The Basque company Contec, specialised in connectivity and security tasks in Internet accesses, has just presented a range of VPN e-Link solutions.

e-Link solutions provide several capacities of connectivity, security and interconnection between the head offices of one or more companies. These solutions guarantee the possibility to keep connected all head offices, representative offices or stores located in different geographical places of a company. That way, they can share all resources a

An accepted assumption in astrophysics holds that it takes more than 1 million years for gas giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn to form from the cosmic debris circling a young star. But new research suggests such planets form in a dramatically shorter period, as little as a few hundred years.

The forming planets have to be able to survive the effects of nearby stars burning brightly, heating and dispersing the gases that accumulate around the giant planets. If the process takes too lo

VLT Interferometer Measures the Size of Proxima Centauri and Other Nearby Stars [1] At a distance of only 4.2 light-years, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the Sun currently known [2]. It is visible as an 11-magnitude object in the southern constellation of Centaurus and is the faintest member of a triple system, together with Alpha Centauri, the brightest (double) star in this constellation. Proxima Centauri is a very-low-mass star, in fact barely massive enough to bu

What kind of mysteries and scientific intrigue await the European Space Agency’s Venus Express once it has left Earth for its nearest planetary neighbour in 2005? A closer inspection promises to reveal a planet that is hugely different from our own despite a few similarities.

Astronomers often call Venus the Earth’s twin because both are about the same size and have the same mass. In other ways, however, Venus seems to be an altogether different class of planet. Scientists are keen

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) jointly announced organizational changes which aim to strengthen research relationships throughout Europe to better support Web technology development.
The change of W3C European Host from INRIA to ERCIM will take place on 1 January 2003. The change allows W3C to better leverage research relationships througho