Three ESA missions are due to send down robotic `spaceprobes` when they arrive at their alien destinations. Since these craft will be going where no one has gone before, how can scientists be sure what it will be like down there? How do you ensure that your spaceprobe is prepared for anything?

Experts take every precaution to ensure that these probes will not burn up entering an alien atmosphere, or meet a spectacular, untimely end via a crash landing on inhospitable terrain. These probes ex

It would send and receive faxes and video and have the processing power of a personal computer. The cell phone of the future would be on the market today but for one hitch: the battery.

The technology is available to build cell phones that would make the latest versions — those that allow users to send pictures and play video games — seem almost primitive. But the batteries now used in cell phones are not nearly powerful enough to drive all the fancy add-ons, said Charles Martin, a Univers

More children are treated in the U.S. with antibiotics for inflammation of the middle ear, or otitis media, than any other child health problem. More than five million cases are diagnosed every year. But now, a scholarly review of over one hundred studies by a U.Va. pediatrician concludes that antibiotics help only one in eight children with ear infections.

Dr. J. Owen Hendley, professor of pediatrics and a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases, writes in the Oct. 10 edition of the Ne

Researchers from Imperial College London have published new results that suggest that over half of BSE cases went unrecognised or unreported during the epidemic in Great Britain. The new figures, to be published in a forthcoming Proceedings B, a learned journal published by the Royal Society, estimate that the total number of cattle infected during the epidemic was over two million.However the paper highlights the need for additional research to reduce the uncertainties in some key biological factors

The International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University and Path1 Network Technologies, Inc. have demonstrated an innovative capability for global, high-quality, high-performance digital video at the recent international iGrid2002 Conference in Amsterdam.

The biennial iGrid (International Grid) event is dedicated to showcasing leading-edge applications enabled by globally high-performance networks. This experiment demonstrated high-performance, end-to-end

A test conducted by two Chicago computer scientists to push trans-Atlantic high-speed data transmission has resulted in a new top speed of 2.8 gigabits (billion bits) per second.

Researchers Joel Mambretti, director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University, and Robert Grossman, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Computing and National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago, set the speed mark Sept. 24 during a present