Researchers at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UKC) have been working with a group of more than two hundred volunteers from among the general public to develop better ways to tackle credit card fraud.

Working with partners across Europe, Professor Mike Fairhurst and Dr Farzin Deravi, from UKC`s Electronics Department, are currently developing a new smart card, which includes a small fingerprint sensor. The credit card user will need to match the fingerprint before the card can be used

Marine reserves have rapid and lasting impacts on organisms inside reserves, according to scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In a paper published in the current issue of Ecology Letters, the researchers reviewed 80 studies from ‘no-take’ reserves, where it is illegal to extract organisms in any way. These showed that density, biomass, average size and diversity of organisms inside these reserves reach much higher levels within a short period of time, usually one to t

In order to function properly, living organisms need to eliminate defective cells. This rule is however not always abided by, as evidenced by cancer cells which no longer carry out the tasks originally set for them and yet continue to proliferate, as though they were ” ignoring ” commands from their environment. Cancer can thus be defined, inter alia, as an ailment affecting signal transduction.

A team working at the Institut Curie (Inserm Unit 528) have been looking into information-con

Fossil plants form new branch in flower family tree.

Fossils recently plucked from rocks in China are the first representatives of a hitherto unknown group of flowering plants, say their discoverers Ge Sun of Jilin University and colleagues 1 .

They also add to growing evidence that flowering plants, which now dominate the land, originally emerged from the water.

The researchers call the group Archaefructaceae. Its members probably flourished in lake

At sufficiently cold temperatures, the atoms in a gas can form what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), losing their individual identities and merging into a single quantum state. The phenomenon has fascinated physicists ever since gaseous BECs were created in the laboratory in 1995 (although the possiblity was first postulated some 70 years earlier), and a flurry of recent research has uncovered all kinds of remarkable condensate properties. Now researchers writing in the journal Nature ha

Rollo, the home robot, has been developed by the Laboratories of Automation Technology, Information and Computer Systems in Automation and Control Engineering of the Helsinki University of Technology for seven years and is presently being adapted for home care and independent living at home. Rollo is part of the “Turning Well-Being Technology into a Success Story” – (iWELL) technology programme of the National Technology Agency Tekes.

“The reason why we arrived at a ball-shaped solution was