On July 30th 2002, the engineers and scientists of the Association Euratom-CEA in Cadarache (France) have achieved a three and a half minutes long plasma discharge on Tore Supra, sustained by 3MW of current drive power, thus requiring to exhaust more than 600 Megajoules of thermal energy during the experiment. It establishes a new world record in this domain after the 280MJ discharges of 1996. Prior to the record discharge, a number of long pulse shots have been achieved, demonstrating the capability

First Ground-Based Mid-Infrared Observations of Brown Dwarfs [1]

A team of European astronomers [2] have observed eight Brown Dwarfs, i.e., small and faint objects also known as “failed stars”, with the TIMMI2 infrared sensitive instrument at the ESO 3.6-m telescope on La Silla.

From two of these, mid-infrared radiation is detected – for the first time ever from such objects with a ground-based telescope. While the younger Brown Dwarf, aged a few million years, is found

By the time you`ve had your new computer for six months, much faster processors will already be on the market. But there is a limit to how fast conventional computers can become. This is because computers process information in a step-by-step fashion, carrying out each part of the process in turn. To make things work really fast, we need to build `quantum computers` instead. Computers today handle information in binary form, representing everything as zeros or ones. In order to process that

An astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics has found that some nanodiamonds, the most famous and exotic form of stardust, may instead have formed within the inner solar system. The findings argue with the wide held belief that nanodiamonds recovered from meteorites from the asteroid belt have been the most abundant type of presolar stardust grain. IGPP Director John Bradley, in conjunction with scientists from the Georg

A significant milestone for British and European science occurred today [8th July 2002] when the Council of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) met in London. At this historic meeting the UK was formally welcomed into ESO by the other nine member states. The UK, one of the leading nations in astronomical research, now joins what is probably the world`s leading astronomical observatory. British astronomers now have access to some of the world`s most advanced telescopes and a major

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a significant breakthrough in the technology to produce crystalline oxide films, which play roles in semiconductor chips, flat panel displays and many other electronic products.

In a report to be published Friday in the journal Science, the OSU scientists explain a way to create these crystalline thin films at temperatures far lower than those used currently, and with no need to be produced in a vacuum as the current technology usually requir

Anything over eight feet tall, six feet wide and weighing over 20 tons might be expected to have a healthy appetite. But no traditional foods are ingested by this behemoth. For the BigBite magnet, the nourishment of choice is subatomic particles, and lots of them. The BigBite spectrometer, which consists of the magnet along with its detectors, will be able to discern scattered particles over a range of energies and angles far greater than can be obtained with the other spectrometers used in Jefferson

It’s a conundrum that’s confounded the curious for several decades. In the past, some called it a crisis. More recently, it’s come to be known as a puzzle: a mystery that has occupied the minds of thousands of researchers worldwide.

Call it the Case of the Missing Spin. A mathematical property of all subatomic particles, including quarks, spin is roughly equivalent to the physical rotation of an object in the macroscopic world.

Physicists have long wondered how the

What questions will it answer; what opportunities will it offer?

History doesn’t record the moment when fully conscious humans asked the first question. The incessant push of human curiosity has nevertheless changed the world. Even so, despite the seemingly inexorable march of science and technology into the current century, questions don’t seem in short supply. Gwyn Williams, basic research program manager for Jefferson Lab’s Free-Electron Laser (FEL), suspects some im

New parallel library allows maximum performance for communication networks

A new message-passing library that makes it possible to extract optimum performance from both workstation and personal computer clusters, as well as from large massively parallel supercomputers has been developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. The new library, called MP_Lite, supports and enhances the basic capabilities that most software programs require to communicate bet

Scientists at Oxford University are developing a new Doppler Global Velocimetry (DGV) technique that will enable three-dimensional fluid velocity fields to be imaged reliably and accurately.

Over the last twenty years, a number of techniques have been explored to enable clear imaging of fluid flows, with the most advantageous being those that are non-intrusive. To date, one of the most important techniques has been particle image velocimetry (PIV). However, there is a major disadvantage wit

The basic technology that produces X-rays has remained essentially the same for a century, but now scientists and physicians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Applied Nanotechnologies Inc. say they should be able to improve it significantly.

Experiments the team conducted have shown they can cause carbon nanotubes, a new form of carbon discovered about a decade ago, to generate intense electron beams that bombard a metal “target” to produce X-rays. Researchers say they

Hackers who try to use or copy software illegally may soon find a sticky web waiting to trap them.

It’s not the World Wide Web. Instead, it’s a new approach under development at Purdue University designed to protect software. By placing a linked brigade of hundreds of tiny “guards” at different points within software code, computer scientists have made it far more difficult for hackers to use software without permission from the vendor.

“Merely cracking a single p

Digital images that have been tampered with could now be spotted – thanks to a digital ‘watermark’ developed by UK scientists

Digital images such as CCTV footage are increasingly being used as evidence in high profile court cases. However, it is easy to tamper with an image and very difficult to tell if any manipulation has taken place.

Researchers have created a digital version of a watermark to tackle this problem and validate digital evidence. The team is led by Profes

Ceramic materials with “split personalities” could lead to new high-temperature superconductors, according to physicists at Ohio State University and their colleagues.

Researchers here have learned that these ceramic materials, called cuprates (pronounced KOOP-rates), switch between two different kinds of superconductivity under certain circumstances.

The finding could settle a growing controversy among scientists and point the way to buckyball-like superconductivity in ceramics.

Surprise Discovery with World`s Leading Telescopes

Combining data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), a group of European and American astronomers have made an unexpected, major discovery.

They have identified a huge number of “young” stellar clusters, only a few billion years old , inside an “old” elliptical galaxy (NGC 4365), probably aged some 12 billion years. For the first time, it has been possible to identify several