Press Releases
Dezember 2009
18 December 2009 - CERN
LHC ends 2009 run on a high note
At its 153rd session today, the CERN1 Council heard that the Large Hadron Collider ended its first full period of operation in style on Wednesday 16 December.
17 December 2009 - ILL
Neutron whispering galleries
A recent ILL experiment on centrifugal quantum states has just been highlighted in the journal Nature Physics. The experiments succeeded in demonstrating for the very first time the weak equivalence principle of general relativity for a massive particle in a pure quantum state.
16 December 2009 - ESO
Astronomers Find World with Thick, Inhospitable Atmosphere and an Icy Heart
Astronomers have discovered the second super-Earth exoplanet for which they have determined the mass and radius, giving vital clues about its structure. It is also the first super-Earth where an atmosphere has been found.
14 December 2009 - CERN
CERN Colour X-ray Technology Set to Save Lives
Medical studies are soon to start with the MARS scanner, a revolutionary CT scanner developed by the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
11 December 2009 - ESO
VISTA: Pioneering New Survey Telescope Starts Work
A new telescope- VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) - has just started work at ESO’s Paranal Observatory and has made its first release of pictures. VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world’s largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky. Its large mirror, wide field of view and very sensitive detectors will reveal a completely new view of the southern sky. Spectacular new images of the Flame Nebula, the centre of our Milky Way galaxy and the Fornax Galaxy Cluster show that it is working extremely well.
10 December 2009 - EMBL
The Battle of the Sexes
Scientists at EMBL and the MRC discovered that if a specific gene located on a non-sex chromosome is turned off, cells in the ovaries of adult female mice turn into cells typically found in testes.
10 December 2009 - EMBL
From fruit fly wings to heart failure. Why Not(ch)?
Scientists at EMBL Monterotondo are the first to prove that the Notch signalling pathway targets heart muscle cells, thus revealing its crucial role in heart development and repair.
7 December 2009 - ESO
Brightness Variations of Sun-like Stars: The Mystery Deepens
An extensive study made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope deepens a long-standing mystery in the study of stars similar to the Sun. Unusual year-long variations in the brightness of about one third of all Sun-like stars during the latter stages of their lives still remain unexplained. Over the past few decades, astronomers have offered many possible explanations, but the new, painstaking observations contradict them all and only deepen the mystery. The search for a suitable interpretation is on.
3 December 2009 - ESO
Stellar Family Portrait Takes Imaging Technique to New Extremes
The young star cluster Trumpler 14 is revealed in another stunning ESO image. The amount of exquisite detail seen in this portrait, which beautifully reveals the life of a large family of stars, is due to the Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Never before has such a large patch of sky been imaged using adaptive optics [1], a technique by which astronomers are able to remove most of the atmosphere's blurring effects.