Press Releases
July 2008
24 July 2008 - ESO
The quiet explosion
A European-led team of astronomers are providing hints that a recent supernova may not be as normal as initially thought. Instead, the star that exploded is now understood to have collapsed into a black hole, producing a weak jet, typical of much more violent events, the so-called gamma-ray bursts. The object, SN 2008D, is thus probably among the weakest explosions that produce very fast moving jets. This discovery represents a crucial milestone in the understanding of the most violent phenomena observed in the Universe.
24 July 2008 - ESO
Watching a 'New Star' Make the Universe Dusty
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, and its remarkable acuity, astronomers were able for the first time to witness the appearance of a shell of dusty gas around a star that had just erupted, and follow its evolution for more than 100 days. This provides the astronomers with a new way to estimate the distance of this object and obtain invaluable information on the operating mode of stellar vampires, dense stars that suck material from a companion.
23 July 2008 - ESO
Accretion Discs Show Their True Colours
Quasars are the brilliant cores of remote galaxies, at the hearts of which lie supermassive black holes that can generate enough power to outshine the Sun a trillion times. These mighty power sources are fuelled by interstellar gas, thought to be sucked into the hole from a surrounding 'accretion disc'. A paper in this week's issue of the journal Nature, partly based on observations collected with ESO's Very Large Telescope, verifies a long-standing prediction about the intensely luminous radiation emitted by these accretion discs.
23 July 2008 - EMBL
Open access to large-scale drug discovery data
The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million (€5.8 million) to EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain.
20 July 2008 - EMBL
Pregnant mice block out unwelcome admirers to protect their pups
Mouse mothers-to-be have a remarkable way to protect their unborn pups. Because the smell of a strange male's urine can cause miscarriage and reactivate the ovulatory cycle, pregnant mice prevent the action of such olfactory stimuli by blocking their smell. Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Monterotondo, Italy, have now revealed the nature of this ability.
17 July 2008 - ESA
The International Space Station, a test-bed for future space exploration
The Heads of the International Space Station (ISS) Agencies from Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States met at European Space Agency (ESA) Headquarters in Paris, France, on July 17, 2008, to review ISS cooperation. As part of their discussions, they noted the significantly expanded capability the ISS now provides for on-orbit research and technology development activities and as an engineering test-bed for flight systems and operations critical to future space exploration initiatives. These activities improve the quality of life on Earth by expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.
11 July 2008 - EMBL
Teaching old drugs new tricks
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] discovered a new way to make use of drugs' unwanted side effects. They developed a computational method that compares how similar the side effects of different drugs are and predicts how likely the drugs act on the same target molecule.
9 July 2008 - EMBL
Zooming in on genetic shuffling
In the current issue of Nature, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, present the most precise map of genetic recombination yet.
8 July 2008 - ESA
Czech Republic accedes to the ESA Convention
The Agreement on the Czech Republic's accession to the ESA Convention was signed on 8 July in Prague, by Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of ESA, and Mirek Topolánek, Prime Minister of the Czech Republic.
7 July 2008 - ESA
Space agency leaders to gather in Paris
On 17 July ESA will host an ISS Heads of Agency meeting at which leaders of the space agencies participating in the International Space Station programme (ESA for Europe, NASA for the US, CSA for Canada, JAXA for Japan, Roscosmos for Russia) will take stock of the ISS status and decide on future activities. The meeting will take place at ESA Headquarters in Paris and will be followed by a press briefing at 13:00 hours.
4 July 2008 - EMBL
New research sheds light on the molecular basis of crib death
Researchers of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo, Italy, have developed a mouse model of the so-called crib or cot death, which remains the leading cause of death during the first year of life in developed countries.
2 July 2008 - ESA
Mars Sample Return: the next step in exploring the Red Planet
The European Space Agency (ESA) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) will be co-hosting, in cooperation with NASA and the International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG), an International Conference on July 9-10 in the Auditorium of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris* to discuss the next step in the exploration of Mars.