Since its successful launch into sun synchronous orbit on the morning of the first of March, Envisat has been getting ready to start observing the Earth.

Its 70 m2 of solar arrays are fully deployed, thus enabling it to obtain power from the Sun, and the ASAR antenna is now extending to its full 10 m, ready for its deployment in space. This will bring to an end the Launch and Early Orbit Phase.

The next step is the Switch on and Data Acquisition Phase that starts today. One by on

A team including scientists at UCMP (Umeå Center for Molecular Pathogenesis), a research unit at Umeå University, shows in last week’s issue of the journal Science that the protein PGRP-LC plays a crucial role in so-called innate immunity.

Professor Dan Hultmark, post-doctoral fellow Svenja Stöven, and doctoral candidate Thomas Werner at UCMP are focusing their attention on the mechanisms behind natural, or innate, immunity, and they are using the fruit-fly, Drosophila melanogaster, as a mod

Physicists design material that conducts one way and insulates the other.

European physicists have sketched out a blueprint for a valve that lets heat pass only one way. The proposed material conducts heat flowing in one direction, but also behaves as an insulator, stopping it going the other way 1 .

In theory, a heat valve could keep parts of microelectronic circuitry cool or channel heat to chip-sized chemical reactors, which are currently being developed fo

European research co-ordinated by TU Delft
Offshore wind technology ready for application

The technology for the construction and operation of offshore windfarms is ready for large-scale application. Companies in the fields of engineering and services are preparing to take part. This can be seen in the conclusions of the project Concerted Action on Offshore Wind Energy in Europe (CA-OWEE) of the European Union, in which seventeen parties from thirteen European countries have brou

Materials scientists at the University of Wales Aberystwyth (UWA) are taking ceramics to new heights in order to determine the structure and stability of the materials which are used to construct aeroplane engines and the tiles for the space shuttle.

Dr Rudi Winter and colleagues from the Department of Physics at UWA are using a unique combination of techniques to study the materials at extreme temperatures which simulate those experienced when aircraft travel at high speed or when they dec

Ancestors of the flightless figurehead of extinction island-hopped.

The flightless dodo’s ungainly shape hid an island-hopping past, say researchers. DNA from the extinct bird has revealed its place in the pigeon family tree, and suggests how it came to end up on its home, and graveyard, the island of Mauritius 1 .

The dodo’s strange appearance led to centuries of wrangling over its ancestry. “It’s the figurehead of extinction, yet little is known about its e