In the 1990s, we dubbed the Internet the `information superhighway`. So why is it still so hard to find what we are looking for online? According to Prof. Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton, it is because the web is mostly linkless. What`s more, if we want the Web to be useful in our daily lives, web links will have to become much more personal.

Prof. Hall is head of Southampton`s Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Research Group. She says that hand-crafted websites generally c

Satellites have detected the shifting forces that weave the Northern Lights.

A group of four spacecraft has given scientists their first glimpse of the immense electrical circuit above the Earth that creates the shimmering veil of the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights 1 .

In January 2001 the four satellites of the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission encountered a beam of electrons moving away from the Earth near the North Pole. The beam was on the outwa

American Geophysical Society Meeting, San Francisco, December 2001

The Sun’s violent outbursts have deep and twisted origins.

The Sun’s violent eruptions of material and magnetic energy have deep and twisted origins, researchers told this week’s American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco, California.

These coronal mass ejections (CMEs) cause the aurora, seen at the Earth’s poles, and can knock out spacecraft. An understanding of what drives CMEs may one da

Mars’ polar ice caps are slowly melting.

The martian ice caps are shrinking. As they are made mostly of frozen carbon dioxide, this evaporation could trigger an increase in Mars’ own greenhouse effect.

Images from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show that ice ridges and escarpments have retreated over the past two years or so. The orbiting probe has also captured the ice thickening and thinning with the passing seasons.

The reason for the change is not yet clea

In any computer’s hard drive, magnetic fields spin electrons this way or that. Now physicists have demonstrated that an electric field can do the same when applied to electrons in semiconductors. And unlike the older magnetic approach, their new device, called a spin gate, is capable of easily imparting a range of spin values. The team’s results, described in a report appearing today in the journal Nature, may one day help to scientists realize the ideal of spintronics—quantum computing based on ele

Astronomers from the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, have made the first direct detection and measurement of the properties of a dark matter object in the Milky Way.
This observation of a gravitational microlensing event — a temporary increase in the brightness of a background star during the time it takes dark matter to pass in front of it — is reported in today’s issue of Nature.

“By measuring its mass, distance and velocity, w

A balanced portfolio of programs could mean a faster quantum computer.

Strategies from the world of finance could help get the best out of quantum computers, say US researchers 1 . The right portfolio of programs could solve a problem many times faster than a single strategem.

Quantum computers – purely hypothetical as yet – would be fast, but you could never be sure whether a program was going to work or not. You would have to keep running the program until

Surprising black hole weigh-in has astronomers scratching their heads.

Forty thousand light years away, on the other side of the Milky Way, lies object GRS1915+105. It is a giant star and a black hole orbiting one another, blasting out X-rays and ejecting gas and dust at close to the speed of light.

Now measurements of this “extreme and puzzling” object are casting doubt on current theories of how such binary systems form and behave. Astronomers have weighed its black hole,

Hubble spots atmosphere on planet 150 light years away.

Astronomers have glimpsed the atmosphere of a planet in a solar system other than our own for the first time. The feat is a first step towards detecting planets capable of supporting life elsewhere in the Universe.

David Charbonneau, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and colleagues, pointed the Hubble space telescope at the planet, which lies 150 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. Of the 7

Devices with DNA software may one day be fitted into cells.

“If you wear the right glasses, a lot of what you see inside the cell is computation,” says Ehud Shapiro of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. Now Shapiro and his colleagues have turned the computational power of biological molecules to their own ends 1 .

The researchers have built a machine that solves mathematical problems using DNA as software and enzymes as hardware. A trillion such biomol

Ultra-minaturized electrical components could shrink supercomputers.

Researchers in the Netherlands and the United States have constructed simple computer circuits with electrical components many times smaller than those on commercial silicon chips 1 , 2 . These ultra-minaturized logic circuits hold out the prospect of hand-held computers as powerful as today’s state-of-the-art supercomputers.

Cees Dekker and co-workers at the Delft University

Some galaxies may have torus envy, if a new study is any indication. The most sensitive imaging yet of nearby galaxy M87’s core reveals that the black hole residing there has either a nonexistent or much fainter ring of dust around it compared with its peers. Scientists had thought that these rings were key features of such highly energetic galaxies. The puzzling finding appears today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .

The current model of active galaxies such as M87 posits that

Cosmic lens magnifies faint galactic building-block.

Astronomers have peered deep into space and time and spotted a baby galaxy. Their results suggest that the tiny star-forming region may have helped to build today’s Universe 1 .

“We believe this is one of the galactic building-blocks that join together to make larger galaxies,” says Konrad Kuijken, of the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, the Netherlands, a member of the team that found the object. The mergin

Silicon still has a lot to offer the microelectronics industry

The end is not nigh for silicon chips. They have “enormous remaining potential”, predicts a new analysis of the limits of integrated circuit technology 1 .

By around 2011, chips could be holding thousands of times more transistors than the billions they house today, calculate James Meindl and colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Trillion-transistor chips are known as ’terascal

Delta Debugging automates the scientific method of debugging. The basic idea of the scientific method is to establish a hypothesis on why something does not work. You test this hypothesis, and you refine or reject it depending on the test outcome. When debugging, people are doing this all the time. Manually. Delta Debugging automates this process. Read more…

WorldSpace and Fraunhofer IIS-A test Mobile Reception in Automobiles ERLANGEN/WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 8, 2000) – A team of engineers from WorldSpace Corporation and the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen have completed a successful test and demonstration of two techniques which together set the stage for WorldSpace receivers to operate in automobiles throughout the WorldSpace coverage area. These techniques are Time Diversity reception technology