Chains of 1 million magnetic nanoparticles have been assembled and disassembled in a solution of suspended particles in a controlled way, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report. Such particles and structures, once their properties are more fully understood and can be manipulated reliably, may be useful in applications such as medical imaging and information storage.
The NIST work, scheduled to be featured on the cover of an upcoming issue
Using laser pulses that last just 70 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), physicists have observed in greater detail than ever before what happens when atoms collide. The experiments at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder, confirm a decades-old theory of how atoms–like tennis balls–briefly lose form and energy when they hit something. The results will help scientists study other atomic-scale processes
The creation of an international Grid federation will help scientists from around the world access computers and information in over 50 countries and regions simply, securely and easily. The International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) was established at the Global Grid Forum meeting which took place in Boston last week, and will bring together organizations representing Asia, the Americas and Europe- from Canada to China and from Portugal to Pakistan. Members of the federation provide systems a
Formula could lead to better tools to predict weather, pollution and water movement
To most people, turbulence is the jolt felt by jet passengers moving through a rough pocket of air. But to scientists, turbulence is the chaotic flow of a gas or liquid, in which parts of the current curl into irregular, ever smaller, tight eddies. It’s a very common phenomenon that can affect weather conditions, greatly alter the movement of pollutants, dampen a vehicle’s speed, or pl
On 26th October the European Space Agency’s Venus Express spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan en route to Earth’s closest planetary neighbour – the ultimate “greenhouse” planet, Venus. This is the first European mission to Venus, the nearest planet to the Earth and the brightest object in our night sky, apart from the Moon.
Whilst Earth and Venus share certain characteristics such as age, mass and diameter they are worlds apart in other respe
New VLT Images Reveal the Surroundings of a Super-massive Black Hole
Near-infrared images of the active galaxy NGC 1097, obtained with the NACO adaptive optics instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, disclose with unprecedented detail a complex central network of filamentary structure spiralling down to the centre of the galaxy. These observations provide astronomers with new insights on how super-massive black holes lurking inside galaxies get fed.
“This is possibly
Scientists today revealed their plans to analyse the magnetic field around Venus in a bid to discover whether the planet’s lack of an internal magnetic field is the reason it is so inhospitable.
At a press conference in London hosted by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, Chris Carr of Imperial College London described how the magnetometer instrument onboard the Venus Express spacecraft will measure the magnetic field around the planet.
Scientists hope th
ESA’s Venus Express mission will be the first spacecraft in more than 10 years to visit our nearest planetary neighbour. To celebrate a new phase of exploration of Earth’s sister world, the Planetary Society has teamed with ESA to invite youths and adults worldwide to enter the Venus Express Art Contest for a chance to win a trip to mission control in Darmstadt, Germany when Venus Express arrives at its destination in April 2006.
Venus, shrouded under a dense haze, is a world stee
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has surprisingly helped spawn a new generation of stars, according to observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This novel mode of star formation may solve several mysteries about the supermassive black holes that reside at the centers of nearly all galaxies.
“Massive black holes are usually known for violence and destruction,” said Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester, United Kingdom, and coauthor of
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory group discovers a paradox: hydrophobic H2O
Now you can extend that truism about oil and water to water and itself. Water and water don’t always mix, either.
The textbooks say that water readily comes together with other water, open arms of hydrogen clasping oxygen attached to other OH molecules. This is the very definition of “wetness.” But scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have observed a first: a single l
Scientists at The University of Manchester have made a major breakthrough which could pave the way for a new type of high-speed computer.
Professor Richard Winpenny, of the School of Chemistry and a team of international researchers, have discovered a new method which could hold the key to creating the first practical quantum computers.
If built, quantum computers would be the most powerful computers ever made, with speeds millions of times faster than the average PC for s
Preparations for ESA’s Venus Express mission passed a new milestone when the spacecraft was attached to its Fregat upper-stage rocket. The mission is now only two weeks away from launch on 26 October.
The composite unit of the launch vehicle adapter (LVA) and the Venus Express spacecraft, together called the ’stack’, has been mechanically mated with the Fregat upper-stage rocket.
The activity was classified as ’hazardous’ since both the space
Observations of Comet 9P/Tempel 1 made by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft after the Deep Impact collision suggest that comets are ‘icy dirtballs’, rather than ‘dirty snowballs’ as previously believed.
Comets spend most of their lifetime in a low-temperature environment far from the Sun. Their relatively unchanged composition carries important information about the origin of the Solar System.
On 4 July this year, the NASA Deep Impact mission sent an ‘impactor’ probe to hit the
Miren Sarasola, Bachelor of Physics Science and researcher of the Materials Department at CEIT, has developed dense high performance low alloy PM steels by liquid phase sintering. The Thesis title is : “Development of dense high performance low alloy PM steels by liquid phase sintering”.
The master alloy concept as a mean for obtaining high density low alloyed PM steels was revisited. In a first instance, several master alloys previously reported in the literature, were reprod
A team of scientists headed by Dr. Christoph Lienau of the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) in Berlin develops and utilizes novel nanoptical techniques for imaging structures that are many times smaller than the wavelength of light. The research is based on a special Scanning Near-Field Optical Microscope (SNOM), patented by MBI, providing extremely high optical resolution and flexible combination with different spectroscopic techniques. A microscope based
The extreme environment surrounding the black hole at the centre of our galaxy is birthplace for new stars, according to a scientist from the University of Leicester.
Dr Sergei Nayakshin and his co-author, Rashid Sunyaev of the Max Plank Institute for Physics in Germany, used Chandra X-ray Observatory images to study the region around Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Their results challenge the traditional theories of star formation, as they
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