Oil from the wrecked tanker off the northwest coast of Spain had already reached the Spanish coast when ESA’s Envisat satellite acquired this radar image of the oil slick, stretching more than 150 km, on Sunday, 17 November, at 10.45 UTC.

The 26-year-old tanker, Prestige, can be seen as a bright white point located about 100 km off the coast. Support vessels are identifiable as smaller white points surrounding the ship. The huge oil slick is clearly visible as a dark plume emanating from the

Record-high magnetic fields in the lab, almost a Gigagauss in magnitude, have been achieved by aiming intense laser light at a dense plasma, expanding the possibilities for laboratory re-creations of astrophysical events.

At last week’s APS Division of Plasma Physics Meeting in Orlando, researchers from Imperial College, London, and the Rutherford Appleton Lab in the UK announced evidence of super-strong magnetic fields that are hundreds of times more intense than any previous magnetic

The measured abundance of helium in the universe (about 25% of all normal matter) suggests that there is about one proton for every 1010 photons. This in turn suggests that at some earlier phase of the universe an almost equal number of protons and anti-protons existed and gradually annihilated, but that because of some fundamental asymmetry (at the level of one part per ten billion) in the way that the weak nuclear force treats matter and antimatter, protons but not anti-protons survived to the pre

A new radiation approach being tested at Stanford University Medical Center could shorten the overall treatment time for women with breast cancer. Participants will receive a single dose of radiation at the time of surgery rather than the usual six-week course of radiation therapy. The clinical trial is now recruiting patients.

“The trial should tell us whether this accelerated form of radiotherapy is safe, feasible and effective in controlling cancer recurrence in the breast for certain wo

By taking continuous electrocardiogram (ECG) readings for 24 hours after treating heart attack patients, Duke University Medical Center researches have shown that giving a combination of a new drug that prevents platelets from clumping together, as well as a clot-busting drug, opens up clogged arteries faster and keeps them open longer.

The researchers found that giving the anti-clotting drug eptifibatide along with a half-dose tenecteplase (TNK) — a genetically altered version of the comm

A Northumbria University lecturer has helped devise a scheme to use music to catch computer bugs.

Dr Paul Vickers from Northumbria and Professor James Alty from Loughborough University’s Department of Computer Science have come up with an idea that would see features of computer programming languages being given short, musical themes. All similar instructions would be given related tunes so that any bug would be easily identified within the system.

“To ensure the musicality