With the recent “warm commissioning” of its linear accelerator, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) has passed a crucial test and milestone on its way to completion in 2006.
The SNS’s linear accelerator, or linac, is composed of two sections: the “warm,” or room temperature section, and a superconducting section that operates at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of the team of six DOE national laboratories
Since it started orbiting Saturn last June, the Cassini mission has returned incredible images of the gas giant, its dazzling rings and its enigmatic moons. But its most dramatic chapter will come this January, when a European lander probe (Huygens) that has been piggybacking on Cassini for the last seven years is sent on a fiery plunge into the murky atmosphere of Saturn’s largest and most mysterious moon, Titan–a chapter that would have ended in disaster, save for an engineer called Boris Sm
The recently released Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) – the most sensitive image of the distant universe ever obtained – has provided UK astronomers with a window on star formation when the universe was young, revealing some of the earliest star forming galaxies yet detected.
The research was led by Dr Andrew Bunker at the University of Exeter and graduate student Elizabeth Stanway at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. Their results have been accepted
To mark the 50th anniversary of CERN ’s creation, local Swiss and French authorities have clubbed together to offer the Organization a spectacular illumination of the 27-kilometre ring of the Large Hadron Collider accelerator. At 20:00 sharp on 29 September, Micheline Spoerri, Head of Geneva’s Department of Justice, Police and Security, will throw the switch for 24 powerful ‘skytracer’ floodlights to light up the night sky of the Geneva – Pays de Gex region.
This illumination forms
A new vision for radio astronomy is bringing together all 20 of Europe’s leading radioastronomy institutes. They plan to build on existing collaboration and significantly enhance the quality and quantity of science currently produced by European astronomers.
RadioNet will create an integrated radio astronomy network providing European scientists with access to world-class facilities along with a research and development plan aimed at supporting and enhancing these facilities. This
Too much heat can destroy a sturdy automobile engine or a miniature microchip. As scientists and engineers strive to make ever-smaller nanoscale devices, from molecular motors and switches to single-molecule transistors, the control of heat is becoming a burning issue. The shapes of molecules really matter, say scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Scranton who timed the flow of vibrational heat energy through a water-surfactant-organic s
A mystery lurking at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy – an object radiating high-energy gamma rays – has been detected by an international team of astronomers. Their research, published today (September 22nd) in the Journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, was carried out using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa.
The Galactic Centre harbours a number of potential gamma-ray sources, including a supermassive bla
Fogged up glasses, windscreens and bathroom mirrors may be a thing of the past.
Researchers have invented a new, permanent, multi-purpose coating technology that will prevent your spectacles, car windscreen or bathroom mirror fogging up ever again. The coating, called XeroCoat, also cuts out unwanted reflections from glass, letting more light through. Making it ideal for spectacles and improving the performance of solar cells and glasshouses.
University of Queensland phys
For the first time, an international team of astronomers led by Guy Perrin from the Paris Observatory/LESIA, (Meudon, France) and Stephen Ridgway from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (Tucson, Arizona, USA) has observed the close environment of five so-called red giant Mira stars, using astronomical interferometric techniques. They found that the observed Mira stars are embedded in a shell of water vapor and possibly of carbon monoxide that extends to twice the stellar radius. Studying the
ESA’s Huygens probe, now orbiting Saturn on board the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft, is in good health and successfully passed its fifteenth ‘In-Flight Checkout’ on 14 September 2004.
This in-flight checkout procedure was the last but one planned before separation of the Huygens probe from Cassini in December this year, and it included some specific activities that were intended to prepare for the separation. The main difference in this procedure from previous checkouts was that
Fundamental questions that particle physicists have pondered for decades might be answered when a $9.2 million neutron physics beam line is built at the Department of Energy’s Spallation Neutron Source on Chestnut Ridge.
At the core of physicists’ excitement is the fact that the SNS will produce up to 100 times more neutrons than are produced by any comparable source in the world. Tapping in to those neutrons will be the Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line, which will he
A University of California scientist working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and researchers from Northrop Grumman Space Technology have developed a novel method for generating electrical power for deep-space travel using sound waves. The traveling-wave thermoacoustic electric generator has the potential to power space probes to the furthest reaches of the Universe.
In research reported in a recent issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Laboratory scientist Scott Backhaus an
It started with tennis balls. As a former collegiate tennis player, Daniela Rus habitually rolls two tennis balls around in her hand as she paces her office. As a robotics researcher at Dartmouth College, she wondered why the tennis balls shouldn’t be able to roll themselves around.
She soon determined that electromagnets didn’t have enough lifting power to solve the tennis-ball problem. However, her question led to a decade-long research program into the challenges of designing robot
Dedication Ceremony in Tucson, Ariz., Will Unveil the World’s Most Powerful Ground-Based Telescope to an International Audience
The LBT Corporation announced today that the dedication ceremonies for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will be held Oct. 15. This scientific achievement will be marked by a formal dedication dinner for partners and their guests. The media is invited to attend tours of the LBT and Arizona astronomy facilities in advance of the dedication.
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A simplified design for ultra-sensitive X-ray detectors offering more precise materials analysis has been demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The advance is a step toward making such devices cheaper and easier to produce. Users may eventually include the semiconductor industry, which needs better X-ray detectors to identify and distinguish between nanoscale contaminant particles on silicon wafers.
The new design, described in the Sept. 13 issue of App
Precision placement may help in building nanoscale devices
In an effort to put more science into the largely trial and error building of nanostructures, physicists at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated new methods for placing what are typically unruly individual atoms at precise locations on a crystal surface. Reported in the Sept. 9, 2004, online version of the journal Science, the advance enables scientists to observe
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