Scientists at CERN announced the completion of the target assembly for the CERN neutrinos to Gran Sasso project, CNGS. On schedule for start-up in May 2006, CNGS will send a beam of neutrinos through the Earth to the Gran Sasso laboratory 730km away in Italy in a bid to unravel the mysteries of nature’s most elusive particles.
CNGS forms a unique element in the global effort to understand neutrinos, the chameleons of the fundamental particle world. Neutrinos come in three types, or flavou
Physicists in Singapore have succeeded in creating the first paper battery that generates electricity from urine. This new battery will be the perfect power source for cheap, disposable healthcare test-kits for diseases such as diabetes. This research is published today in the Institute of Physics’ Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
Scientists in research groups around the world are trying to design ever smaller “biochips” that can test for a variety of diseases at once
Acceleration and quantum entanglement
Consider that Alice and Bob are two observers at rest separated by a long distance. Each of them has a measuring device that detects, respectively, two different quantum systems. The state of the joint system is said to be maximally entangled if, for many copies of the state, any measurement that Alice makes is completely determined by Bob’s and vice versa.
What would happen to their entanglement if Alice fell into a black ho
APL-Built Spectrometer on NASA’s Latest Mission to the Red Planet
With today’s launch of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars – or CRISM – joins the set of high-tech detectives seeking traces of water on the red planet.
Built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., CRISM is the first visible-infrared spectrometer to fly
Researchers at UCSD and Clemson University have discovered that specially synthesized carbon nanotube structures exhibit electronic properties that are improved over conventional transistors used in computers. In a paper published* in the September issue of Nature Materials and released online on August 14, UCSD Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering professors Prabhakar Bandaru and Sungho Jin, graduate student Chiara Daraio, and Clemson physicist Apparao M. Rao reported that Y-shaped nanotubes beh
Astronomers from the universities of Hertfordshire and Kent have received a grant which will allow them to map large areas of the sky 1000 times faster than with current technology.
The universities, in conjunction with the University of British Columbia and the Joint Astronomy Centre, have been awarded 1,500 hours of observation and survey time on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii. The award, which is part of the JCMT Major Legac
New work by two researchers at HP Laboratories Bristol sets out to solve one of the major difficulties in quantum computer architectures that use directly interacting qubits.
The problem is that the million-or-so qubits necessary to do useful calculations in a quantum computer would all feel the presence of each other, meaning that the information would leak in an uncontrollable way. The more qubits that are put together this way, the harder it is to control them.
The
From chemical fingerprints preserved in primitive meteorites, scientists at UCSD have determined that the collapsing gas cloud that eventually became our sun was glowing brightly during the formation of the first material in the solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago.
Their discovery, detailed in a paper that appears in the August 12 issue of Science, provides the first conclusive evidence that this “protosun” played a major role in chemically shaping the solar system by em
VLT NACO Instrument Helps Discover First Triple Asteroid
One of the thousands of minor planets orbiting the Sun has been found to have its own mini planetary system. Astronomer Franck Marchis (University of California, Berkeley, USA) and his colleagues at the Observatoire de Paris (France) [1] have discovered the first triple asteroid system – two small asteroids orbiting a larger one known since 1866 as 87 Sylvia [2].
“Since double asteroids seem to be common, people hav
Our Galaxy could be a lot bigger than we thought. That’s the conclusion of team of astronomers that’s found whole new ‘suburbs’ of stars in another galaxy.
Like archaeologists unearthing a lost city, the Australian and US astronomers used the 8-m Gemini South telescope in Chile to reveal the faint ancient outer parts of the galaxy NGC 300, showing that that galaxy is at least twice as big as previously thought.
The finding implies that our own Galaxy too is probably much
A team of astronomers from The Netherlands and the UK has discovered a vast ‘jet-powered bubble’ formed in the gas around a black hole in the Milky Way. The discovery means that for decades scientists have been severely underestimating how much power black holes pump back into the universe instead of merely swallowing material across their event horizons.
Jets of energy and particles flowing outwards at close to the speed of light are a common feature of all accreting black holes,
Blazing hot temperatures welcomed ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft as it arrived at the Yubileiny airport of the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on Sunday morning, 7 August.
The shipment, including the spacecraft and all the complex equipment needed for ground support to prepare for launch, was carried by an Antonov 124 cargo plane which left the airport of Toulouse, France, on Saturday 6 August.
On arrival the precious load was unloaded from the huge cargo bay of the pla
In fact a new scientific instrument has been brought on line at the ILL, with the capacity to test industrial-scale components. The neutrons generated at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) have the capacity to penetrate far inside all sorts of matter and the new instrument SALSA can do more. With SALSA scientists and engineers can test materials in a non-destructive manner, without for example being obliged to cut up the parts they are checking. This means that whole turbine blades or cam shafts can
This morning an Ariane 5G launcher lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. On board was the largest telecommunications satellite ever to be placed into geostationary transfer orbit.
The mission was initially delayed during the two-hour-long launch window to verify telemetry readings from Ariane 5’s mobile launch table, and the countdown subsequently resumed for an early morning takeoff from the ELA-3 launch zone.
The heavyweight THAICOM 4 (IPSTAR) satel
The Beginnings of a New Phase in Medical Imaging? Phase-Contrast Imaging Device Provides 3-Dimensional Views of Hard-to-Image Biological Objects
In a development that could help usher in a new kind of medical imaging for clinics and hospitals, researchers have demonstrated a practical x-ray device that provides 2- and 3-dimensional images of features in soft biological tissue that are ordinarily hard to discern with conventional x-ray imaging. Performed by researchers at the Paul
Since the invention of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in 1986 by Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, the tool has been employed to advance the science of materials in many ways, from nanopatterning (dip-pen nanolithography) to the imaging of surfaces and nano-objects such as carbon nanotubes, DNA, proteins and cells. In all these applications, the quality and integrity of the tip used to obtain the images or interrogate materials is paramount.
A common problem in atomic force microscopy is
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