Even a conventional mobile phone user demands more functions and better performance of his mobile phone in the smallest possible space. The mobile phone should also be easy to use, reliable and inexpensive. In order to meet these demands, more data and functions than before must be packed into the circuit boards of mobile phones in the future.

The researchers at the Helsinki University of Technology have met this challenge by developing a new type of production method for electronics, a so-c

Thirty years after Apollo 16’s lunar module, Orion, landed at the western edge of the Descartes Mountains on 21 April 1972, there is still much that we don’t know about the Moon. For instance, how was it created? And what role did it play in the formation and evolution of Earth?

We may be closer to answering those, and many other questions, thanks to ESA’s mission to the Moon, known as SMART-1. Due to be launched early in 2003, the main purpose of the SMART-1 mission is to flight-test the n

How can the Universe be studied? There is no way to affect a research object of infinite dimensions. It means that the research can only be carried out via observations, employing all methods available. To this end scientists have been inventing more and more powerful telescopes which would enable them to examine closely remote spots of the Universe and to hear a `voice` of the sky at all available bandwidths. The scientists are planning to dispatch to space a cryogen submillimetric telescope called

The Sun emits electron-neutrinos, elementary particles of matter that have no electric charge and very little mass, created in vast numbers by the thermonuclear reactions that fuel our parent star. Since the early 1970s, several experiments have detected neutrinos arriving on Earth, but they have found only a fraction of the number expected from detailed theories of energy production in the Sun. This meant there was either something wrong with our theories of the Sun, or our understanding of neutrino

The mysterious spectral bands in the infrared of interstellar gas clouds in deep space originate from organic compounds. Research by the Nijmegen physicist Hans Piest confirms this. He has provided new experimental evidence for this almost 30-year-old problem in astronomy.

Each molecule has specific wavelengths at which it can either absorb or emit light. This forms the fingerprint of a substance. With this fingerprint, astronomers can demonstrate the presence of a substance in a distant sta

Brass instrument makers could soon be using the latest technology to refine the manufacturing of trumpets and cornets. An improved way of taking internal measurements of musical instruments, published today in the Institute of Physics journal, Measurement Science and Technology, has been developed by scientists at the University of Edinburgh, the Open University and Smith-Watkins Brass.

In a trumpet or cornet the musical qualities of the instrument, for example the tone, response and intonat

One lump of rock is revealed as two in the distant Kuiper belt.

The stand-offish dance of two asteroids at the outer reaches of the Solar System is captivating astronomers. The two rocky objects, discovered locked in mutual orbit, could tell us about the properties of the far-flung Kuiper belt.

Christian Veillet and his team 1 studied an object called 1998 WW31 in the Kuiper belt, a sparsely populated region of space beyond the orbit of Neptune. The object w

Between now and Saturday, 20 April, you can follow via the Internet the progress of the new-found Comet SOHO-422. Usually, comets seen by the SOHO spacecraft quickly burn up in the Sun’s hot atmosphere. This one won’t, so there is still time to monitor its progress.

Like most of the hundreds of comets found with the ESA-NASA sun-watching spacecraft, SOHO-422 was first noticed by an amateur astronomer. Pictures from SOHO are made available, freely and rapidly, on the Internet. Peop

P3P gives people more control over use of personal information on the Web

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has issued the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, representing cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language for expressing Web site privacy policies. Declaring P3P a W3C Recommendation indicates that it is a stable document, contributes to Web interoperability, and has been reviewed by the W3C Membership, who favor its widespread adoption.

Random vibrations can generate rotation.

A simple top converts foghorn noise to one-way spin. The device raises the hope that useful energy could be collected from ambient sounds. Normally, random vibrations, which physicists and engineers call noise, produce useless random motion. You can’t move a cart from A to B by shoving it randomly in every direction.

But in the new device, made by Yaroslav Zolotaryuk of the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby and colleagues

The first steps in a new method of detecting landmines by determining the presence of tiny quantities of the explosive TNT (trinitrotoluene) are described in research published today in the Institute of Physics publication Journal of Physics D. Markus Nolte, Alexei Privalov and Franz Fujara of Darmstadt Technical University in Germany, together with Jurgen Altmann of Dortmund University and Vladimir Anferov from the Kalingrad State University in Russia, describe in the journal how they have devised a

In the past five weeks two asteroids have passed close by Earth, at distances of 1.2 and 3 times the distance to the Moon. Another asteroid has recently been shown to be on course for a collision with Earth in 2880.

Monitoring known asteroids allows astronomers to predict which may collide with Earth. But that is only true for the asteroids we know of. What about those that lie in the asteroid blind spot between the Sun and Earth? The European Space Agency is studying ways in which its miss

Astronomers probing the intimate details of apparently quiescent stellar black holes have discovered that in reality they are dynamic, lively places, subject to flares that briefly illuminate the whole of the gas disc around the black hole. Their observations are helping to build up a picture of precisely where X-rays are generated in the gas as it heats up to extreme temperatures and swirls around under incredible gravitational forces before cascading into the black hole itself. On Friday 12 April,

Galaxies were once thought of as `island universes` evolving slowly in complete isolation. This is now known not to be the case. By using the world`s most powerful X-ray observatories, UK astronomers are discovering that most of these gigantic star systems interact with each other in a wide variety of ways.

During the UK National Astronomy Meeting in Bristol on Thursday 11 April, Dr. Andrew Read (University of Birmingham) will present new results from the Chandra and XMM-Newton spacecraft ab

New count doubles the rocks in asteroid belt.

There are twice as many asteroids between Mars and Jupiter as previously believed, according to the latest study. But the probability of a stray one colliding with Earth remains negligible.

Edward Tedesco of US research company TerraSystems Inc.and Francois-Xavier Désert of the Astrophysical Laboratory in Grenoble, France, found that there are between 1.1 million and 1.9 million asteroids swarming round the ’main asteroid belt’1.

An unprecedented source of planetary nebulae, the disk-like relics of elderly, dying stars, has been discovered in the southern part of our Milky Way galaxy.

With about 1000 planetary nebulae found so far and many more still to be discovered, the number of aged stars in their death throes revealed by the new survey is rapidly overtaking the entire population discovered over the entire sky during the last 75 years.

The cosmic graveyard is revealed in deep survey images taken in ‘H-a