Whoever thinks that ants are only erratic little beings, whose incessant wanderings are pointless or obey no kind of universal order, is very much mistaken. Their society is so organized and complex that it is already being used as a model for the creation of algorithms, adaptable to a variety of scientific areas.

Inspired by the work of Chialvo and Millonas – the creators of the first numeric simulation according to which the formation of collective cognitive maps of social insects can be

According to Douglas Adams, in his famous book The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, space is big. However, it seems near-Earth space is not big enough. In December 2001, the Space Shuttle pushed the International Space Station away from a discarded Russian rocket booster that was due to pass uncomfortably close. Space litter is a growing problem but smarter satellite design may help in the future.

From the beginning of the space era, satellites and deep-space probes have populated the Solar

Researchers at Ohio State University and their colleagues have expanded the possibilities for a new kind of electronics, known as spintronics.

Though spintronics technology has yet to be fully developed, it could result in computers that store more data in less space, process data faster, and consume less power. It could even lead to computers that “boot up” instantly, said Arthur J. Epstein, professor of physics and chemistry and director of Ohio State’s Center for Materials Research.

A new Scottish multi-million pound photonics company is geared up for the future of telecommunications after securing a seven figure private investment deal.

The investment has allowed Helia Photonics Ltd, a Heriot-Watt University spin-out to purchase the coatings division of Terahertz Photonics in a technology transfer deal, and say they are already in discussions with a European partner over a major contract.

Helia Photonics CEO, David Hamilton, says they will be concentrating on

Professor Mikel Izal from the Public University of Navarre, Basque Country, has analysed the problems to integrate new optic networks in actual network and transfer level (TCP/IP) Internet protocols. This integration will enable to create the core of the second Internet generation in future, the so called Internet 2.

In that area, technological innovations are created everyday and the thesis has been focused on the burst switching networks corresponding to the second optic Internet generatio

Study Suggests Promising New Avenues for Nanotube Research

Superconducting nanotubes may lie on the technology horizon, suggests a theoretical study recently published by researchers from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Pennsylvania, and Bilkent University in Turkey.

The intriguing possibility is the team’s most recent finding in a spate of studies showing how changing the shape of tiny single-walled

An international team of physicists working at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) facility at CERN has announced the first controlled production of large numbers of antihydrogen atoms at low energies. After mixing cold clouds of trapped positrons and antiprotons – the antiparticles of the familiar electron and proton – under closely monitored conditions, the ATHENA collaboration has identified antihydrogen atoms, formed when positrons bind together with antiprotons. The results are published online toda

Physicists have just achieved the world’s first controlled production of anti-hydrogen atoms, the crucial first step towards precision studies of its properties.
This achievement has opened up the potential to cool, trap and study anti-atoms.

A team from the University of Wales – Swansea, led by Professor Michael Charlton, played a key role in this major breakthrough as part of an international consortium, ATHENA. The Swindon based Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council provi

This week, astrobiologists are discussing what ESA`s Huygens spaceprobe might discover when it parachutes to the surface of Saturn`s mysterious moon, Titan, in 2005. Titan possesses a rich atmosphere of organic molecules, which Huygens will analyse. Recently some scientists have begun to think that, by redefining life, in broader terms, what we may find on Titan may be life. If this is the case, it certainly will not be life as we know it…

Titan is an astrobiologist`s dream laboratory. Its

Budding computer experts from around the world will this week begin their own tests of the latest software developed by the European DataGrid Project. Students attending the 2002 CERN School of Computing in Vico Equense, Italy, will be submitting jobs that can run anywhere on the Project’s current Grid, which is based at 10 computer centres throughout Europe. This is the first in a series of important tests using software from the DataGrid Project that will take place throughout the autumn, and which

If people were computers, Srinidhi Varadarajan of Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science could enable them to go back to their youth to correct mistakes they made, adapt a jet engine to run a car, or change a part from one SUV engine to another as both vehicles sped down a highway side by side.

Of course, people aren’t computers and don’t need to do those things, but computers need to do equivalent processes. Varadarajan has come up with a computer technology he calls “Weaves” that

Drawing on the expertise of the blind, a University of Toronto professor is “teaching” electronic devices how to navigate using surrounding sounds.

“The goal was to build a system that mimics the acoustic navigation abilities of blind people,” says Professor Parham Aarabi of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has developed a method by which a device fitted with as few as two microphones can combine the information from sounds around it to locate

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have produced the first ever action movies starring individual water molecules on a metal surface. The ending was a surprise even to the producers.

Working with a unique scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a team led by Miquel Salmeron, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, cooled the surface of a single crystal of palladium, a good catalyst for reactions involving hydrogen and water, to a tem

British astronomers, together with Australian and American colleagues, have used the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope [AAT] in New South Wales, Australia to discover a new planet outside our Solar System – the 100th to be detected. The discovery, which is part of a search for solar systems that resemble our own, will be announced today (Tuesday) at a conference on “The origin of life” in Graz, Austria. This takes the total number of planets found outside our solar system to 100, and scientists are now

Although you can never be certain of predicting future developments in science, there is a good chance of a fundamental breakthrough in physics soon. With a series of unique experiments and missions designed to test our understanding of gravity, the European Space Agency (ESA) hopes to get to the very bottom of it.

Scientists will study space phenomena that do not seem to conform to our perceived understanding of gravity. In this way, they hope to develop a greater comprehension of the Univ

Nature has been manipulating structures on the atomic and molecular scale for millions of years, in comparison humans have only been developing these techniques over the last few decades. Molecular engineering builds structures and devices at the smallest scales imaginable, aiming to make better materials, new types of information technologies, biomedical devices and much more. In an article, `Natural strategies for the molecular engineer`, published today in the Institute of Physics` journal, Nanote