Researchers have found that a portion of anomalous cosmic rays — charged particles accelerated to enormous energies by the solar wind — results from interactions with dust grains from a belt of comet-sized objects near Pluto’s orbit. These objects make up what is known as the Kuiper Belt, a remnant of the formation of the solar system.

“This novel finding shows how dust in the cosmos may play an important role for producing the most energetic particles known,” says Dr. Nathan S

Physicists have devised a new experiment that will be used in the quest for exotic forces in nature and “additional spatial dimensions.”

The researchers have demonstrated an innovative way to measure a phenomenon known as the Casimir effect – findings that also could have implications for the design of microscopic machines that contain tiny parts on the size scale of nanometers – or billionths of a meter.

The scientists are taking their theoretical findings a step further by

Potential applications abound

In a milestone that conjures up the refrain to a Paul McCartney song, researchers at MIT and University College London have linked “hands across the water” in the first transatlantic touch, literally “feeling” each other’s manipulations of a small box on a computer screen.

Potential applications abound. “In addition to sound and vision, virtual reality programs could include touch as well,” said Mandayam A. Srinivasan, director of MIT’

In search of cosmic mayhem

A physicist at Washington University in St. Louis working with scientists at the Smithsonian Institution is unveiling the dark, violent side of the universe.

Studying the highest energy photons known to science, Washington University Associate Professor of Physics James H. Buckley, Ph.D., and his colleagues are analyzing bursts of gamma rays released from massive black holes at the center of so-called active galaxies.

Using the Whipple Ob

Sometime within the next two years, researchers will detect the first signals of gravity waves — those weak blips from the far edges of the universe passing through our bodies every second. Predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity waves are expected to reveal, ultimately, previously unattainable mysteries of the universe.

Wai-Mo Suen, Ph.D., professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis is collaborating with researchers nationwide to develop waveform t

The oozing of glacial material in the floating ice shell on Jupiter’s moon Europa has important implications for future exploration of the enigmatic moon and prospects of life in its ice-covered ocean, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor.

Robert Pappalardo, an assistant professor in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department and one of the world’s foremost Europa experts, said the icy moon is believed to contain an ocean some 13 miles under its icy

The basque company Endorasoft has created two computer systems that will offer to consumers and companies more services and possibilities for this kind of telephone systems.

Endorasoft is a company that develops software and hardware for applications in mobile telephone systems. At the present, they have two products, XSMS and XSIM, two new products in the market.

The XSMS is designed for massive sending of short messages by mobile phones. The objective is to avoid the rest

The next radically different means of information processing will be quantum computing, which researchers say will use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform complex calculations in a fraction of the time needed by the world’s fastest supercomputers.

A paper published recently in Physical Review Letters (Nov. 4 issue) has proposed an experimentally realizable circuit and an efficient scheme to implement scalable quantum computing. The ability to scale up the technology from the one

Wie am 19 Oktober 2002 den Delegierten bei dem Kongress der European Society for Medical Oncology in Nizza mitgeteilt wurde, dürfte sich die Chip Technology zur Auswertung von genetischen Informationen in der Zukunft als eines der wichtigsten Instrumente für die Krebsprognose herausstellen.

Krebs wird durch Veränderungen oder Mutationen in Genen und durch andere Zellanomalien ausgelöst. Die Informationen des Human Genome Project bieten jetzt ein wertvolles Werkzeug, um die genetische Basis

A British physicist has come up with a way to reveal the shifting and shining colours that form in the dark spots where light waves interfere with each other. The patterns await experimental demonstration but computer-generated images are already illuminating new aspects of light that had until now remained in the shadows.
When two waves meet their peaks and troughs interfere. If the peaks are in phase you get a higher peak as the energies of each wave add together, two troughs take away from eac

Astronomers have identified the vivid scar of a cosmic catastrophe: a blue arc thousands of light years long produced when a galaxy pulled in a smaller satellite galaxy and tore it apart.

The streak is composed of clusters of young blue stars that formed as the larger galaxy, Centaurus A, absorbed the smaller galaxy about 200 million to 400 million years ago. Researchers will report in the December Astronomical Journal that their discovery suggests absorption of smaller galaxies may be a sig

Supermassive black holes – the name given to black holes whose mass is more than 1,000,000 times the mass of the sun – can be found at the center of many galaxies. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and several institutions in France have succeeded in tracking a star racing around a dark mass at the center of our galaxy. This achievement offers more support for the widely held view that the dark mass is a supermassive black hole.

Today, Eurescom, Spirent Communications, and BTexact Technologies announced the completion of a test that confirms the feasibility of performance management for IP Quality of Service (QoS) using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS).

As a result of this test, service providers will be able to employ a simplified methodology for identifying the location of performance problems across multiple operator networks, and for verifying their capability to capture performance information at various cl

Purdue University researchers have created a software tool that is more than 100 times faster than other programs used by engineers to improve jet engine designs

The software analyzes engine models and quickly extracts information that indicates whether the design is mechanically sound, said Mario Rotea, a professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Considering the complex inner workings of a jet engine, software aimed at predicting how well a new desig

An international team of astronomers [2], lead by researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), has directly observed an otherwise normal star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Ten years of painstaking measurements have been crowned by a series of unique images obtained by the Adaptive Optics (AO) NAOS-CONICA (NACO) instrument [3] on the 8.2-m VLT YEPUN telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory. It turns out that earli

An early version of a new software system developed by University at Buffalo researchers that detects cyberattacks while they are in progress by drawing highly personalized profiles of users has proven successful 94 percent of the time in simulated attacks.

The “user-level anomaly detection system” was described here today (Oct. 10, 2002) at the military communications conference known as MILCOM 2002.

“We have developed a new paradigm, proactively encapsulating user intent where y