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When earthquakes strike, people often get trapped in buildings. Search and rescue teams can pinpoint some victims using sniffer dogs and sensors. But a new European system that takes pictures during or after a building collapse promises to save many more lives.

The ‘low-cost catastrophic event capturing system’ is the fruit of the IST Loccatec project. It comprises capturing devices (small, autonomous infrared cameras) and a portable central unit for the rescue teams. The cameras – p

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

Males pirate and fertilize egg clutches

One of Europe’s most common backyard frogs has been keeping a secret that, despite centuries of study and thousands of published papers, has only now been discovered in ponds in the Pyrenees. The European common frog, Rana temporaria, has long been thought to have a straightforward breeding strategy — one lucky male grabs the female and fertilizes her eggs as soon as she releases them into the water. End of story.

But that&#

Applied Search Technology Ltd (AST) of Aston University in Birmingham, UK has announced the launch of its new software CADFind Sketch and Search – the first commercial design retrieval system in the world that can find 2D engineering drawings from a sketch.

The new software could save manufacturing companies thousands of pounds in part design by allowing the user to search, retrieve and use geometrically similar parts from their database, based on a customer drawing or a simple ske

British astronomers are celebrating a world first that could revolutionise the future of astronomy. They have just begun a project to operate a global network of the world’s biggest robotic telescopes, dubbed ’RoboNet-1.0’ which will be controlled by intelligent software to provide rapid observations of sudden changes in astronomical objects, such as violent Gamma Ray Bursts, or 24-hour surveillance of interesting phenomena. RoboNet is also looking for Earth-like planets, as yet unseen elsewhere

Whether the search for alternative energy sources is driven by our concern about global fossil fuel supplies or over the atmospheric effects of burning of fossil fuels, the government has laid out its aim to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 60% of 1990 levels by 2050, and aims to over- achieve its goal of sourcing 10% of energy from renewables by 2010.

In a significant step to achieve these targets, an enormous £4.5 million award has been made under the UK SuperGen programme to drive