Prof. Gupta was chosen for the 2009 prize jointly with Prof. Ivor Grattan-Guinness of UK by the International Commission for the History of Mathematics. The award was presented to Prof. Grattan-Guinness at the 23rd International Congress of History of Science and Technology held in Budapest, Hungary (for details click here). Prof. Gupta could not attend this Congress and will receive the award in his home country, India at the Closing Ceremony of the ICM on 27 August 2010.

Prof. Gupta's major contributions in the field include work on the history of development of trigonometry in India. He authored the chapter 'Historiography of Mathematics in India' in the book Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development. He was the President of the Association of Mathematics Teachers of India since 1994 until recently. He also founded the journal Ganita Bharati (meaning "Indian Mathematics").

The Prize is named after the mathematician and historian - Kenneth O. May - founder of the International Commission for the History of Mathematics and its journal Historia Mathematica. The prize, instituted in 1989, consists of a bronze medal and is given once in four years in appreciation of a mathematician's scholarly work in the history of mathematics.

More info about ICM is available here.

British Council is conducting an important survey and very much hope you will be able to share your views with them. They are designing a new programme that will create a network of people across disciplines, sectors and cultures who have the creative skills to collaboratively work towards solutions to challenges that all societies face. As an active member of the research and innovation community, they'd like to ask you some questions about your research interests, and how you interact with your peers and colleagues.

It is being run by the British Council solely for this purpose and the confidentiality of your answers will be guaranteed. Your answers will not be connected to you as an individual or shared with another party. The survey is being conducted online, so to give your views all you have to do is go to the following internet address surveymonkey.com/s/GlobalInnovationLab.

This will take you straight to the online survey, which should take you around 15 minutes to complete.

All those who complete the survey will be entered into a prize draw. For the winner of the draw, British Council will donate the sum of £250 to a charity of her/ his choice.

The closing date for the survey is 15 June 2010.

If you have any queries about completing this survey, please contact Gabriel Ivan at the British Council Romania on +40 (0)21 307 9639 or e-mail gabriel.ivan at britishcouncil.ro. He will be happy to answer your questions.

Some 3 800 participants are expected from EU institutions, business and industry, non-governmental organisations, public authorities, the scientific community and academia.

More info on Events section, click here.

"I am very pleased to receive this award.  I am sure that this important recognition will also be an award for my laboratory and all the friends who supported me in these outreach activities" said Dr Lilensten in an Europlanet news release.

Dr Thierry Fouchet, Outreach Coordinator for Europlanet, said, "Dr Lilensten deserves recognition, not just for his dedication in developing planeterrella and his inspirational demonstrations, but also for his generosity in sharing his expertise and making the plans for the planeterrella available so that this spectacular outreach tool can be used more widely.  Through this new Europlanet prize, we hope to encourage outreach within the planetary science community and we are delighted that this first prize will go to someone who has shown such a strong commitment to collaboration and sharing best practice."

For more than 10 years, Dr Lilensten has worked to share the magic of planetary aurorae with school children and members of the public across Europe, using his 'planeterrella' experiment.

Aurorae, or the Northern and Southern Lights, are beautiful green, red and blue lightshows that occur around the Earth's magnetic poles.  They provide scientists with crucial information about the space environment surrounding the Earth, our 'space weather'.

The planeterrella is inspired by experiments carried out at the turn of the last century by the Norwegian physicist, Kristian Birkeland, who first described how the Northern Lights were caused by the solar wind's interaction with the Earth's magnetic field. In a series of experiments, Birkeland aimed a beam of electrons at a magnetized sphere (terrella) inside a glass vacuum chamber and succeeded in recreating the ethereal glow of the aurora at the sphere's poles.

In 1996, Dr Lilensten visited a colleague in Norway, Terje Brundtland, who was restoring apparatus that Birkeland had used in 1913 for his largest experiment. Following the visit, Dr Lilensten built several terrellas with colleagues and students. From this series of experiments, he envisaged a portable, flexible version that could be used both as a scientific tool and for public engagement.

In addition to demonstrating how the Earth's aurorae are created, the planeterrella can show auroral effects at Uranus and Neptune, the Van Allen radiation belts, the magnetopause and various effects seen around highly magnetized stars, such as stellar ring currents and jets.

Dr Lilensten has trained colleagues and students in demonstrating the planeterrella and the Laboratoire de Planétologie de Grenoble hosts approximately two demonstrations per month.  The experiment has been shown in exhibitions around France and featured on French and German television. Dr Lilensten has developed a website - planeterrella.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr - in French and English that describes the experiment, gives information about aurorae and shows images and movies of planeterrella in action.

Observatories in Toulouse and Paris-Meudon now have their own copies of the planeterrella and another will go on display in the Palais de la Découverte in Paris later this year.  Dr Lilensten is working with groups in the UK, Italy and Switzerland who propose to build their own versions.

The Europlanet Research Infrastructure is a major (€6 million) programme co-funded by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission.

The Europlanet Research Infrastructure links more than 100 laboratories in Europe and around the world. The project aims to integrate and consolidate the planetary science community in Europe by organising networking activities, meetings and conferences, providing access to laboratories and field sites in Europe, developing new facilities and field sites and creating online access to planetary science data. Through its outreach activities, Europlanet aims to create a dynamic network of people across Europe involved in public engagement with planetary science, motivate and enable European planetary scientists to be involved with outreach activities and find innovative ways of raising the profile of Europe's planetary science activity among citizens, as well as policy makers and industry.

ForWiki - available online since March - is a collaborative web platform dedicated to foresight community, having two main areas.

The first area is dedicated to debate and analysis of foresight concepts applicable in higher education.

The second, and the largest one, represents a repository of scientifique practices and results in foresight as well as descriptions of specific methods (desirable scenarios).

More info about the Bucharest workshop is available here and here.

"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the Solar System," says Glenn Orton, who led the team of astronomers that made the study.

"We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated."

The spot is a cold region averaging about -160 degrees Celsius and it is a very wide region.

"Think of fitting nearly three Earths end-to-end the length of the interior of the Great Red Spot", says Glenn Orton in a short comment send by email to us.

"One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the spot is about 3 to 4 degrees warmer than the environment around it," says lead author Leigh Fletcher.

"This is the first time we can say that there's an intimate link between environmental conditions - temperature, winds, pressure and composition - and the actual colour of the Great Red Spot," says Fletcher in an ESO's news release.

"Although we can speculate, we still don't know for sure which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red colour, but we do know now that it is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm," he also added.

The Great Red Spot is a feature on Jupiter of 24,000 km long and 11,000 km wide. It was first reported by Robert Hooke in 1664 and has been observed ever since.

Nominations for the 2010 prizes must be submitted by 31 March 2010.

Each prize consists of 15,000 US dollars and is accompanied by a plaque inscribed with the recipient's major contributions.

Every year, one prize is awarded in each of the following fields: biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, agricultural sciences, earth sciences, engineering sciences, and medical sciences.

Details about eligibility, nominations, and selection are available here.

The "TWAS Prizes" evolved from two pre-existing award schemes: TWAS Awards in Basic Sciences, instituted in 1985, to recognize and support outstanding achievements made by scientists from developing countries in biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics, and TWNSO Prizes in Applied Sciences, awarded since 1990 by the Third World Network of Scientific Organizations, in the fields of agriculture and technology.

The international symposium "Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy: Building Bridges between Cultures" will take place between 5 - 9 January, 2011.

The main conference will take place at Centro Cultural Peruano Britanico, Miraflores.

More details are avialable here.

The Oxford symposia are supported by the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC).

Archaeoastronomy is an interdisciplinary field of research that include astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, history, museum studies, surveying, statistics, and the history of religions as well as the history of science and astronomy.

Researchers used a photographic system called PhotoFace, developed by experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol, to scan the 3D shape of volunteers' noses and used computer software to analyse them according to six main nose shapes: Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up.

They used only three characteristics in their analysis: the ridge profile, the nose tip, and section between the eyes at the top of the nose. Then they combined the information and used it to distinguish between a database of 36 people.

"Noses, however, are much easier to photograph and are harder to conceal, so a system that recognises noses would work better with an uncooperative subject or for covert surveillance" Dr Adrian Evans, who led the study at the University of Bath, said in the news release.

"We've only tried this on a small sample of people, but the technique certainly shows potential, perhaps to be used in combination with other identification techniques," he added.

More info is available here.

The researchers' primary goal was to try to hear information that their eyes might have missed in solar wind speed and particle density data gathered by NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite.

"What makes this project different is the level of artistic license I was given," composer and recent U-M School of Music alumnus Robert Alexander said in a U-M news release.

"Every piece of scientific data tells a story. I'm expressing this story through music," he added.

While the researchers didn't detect new information in this initial experiment, they see possibilities. "I am excited for sonification's potential in research, but I think more work will need to be done to realize that potential," said Jim Raines, research computer specialist with the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.

Thomas Zurbuchen, an associate dean in engineering and an atmospheric science professor, was the man behind the sonification project.

"To me, this project exemplifies what U-M is about: creativity reaching seamlessly across many fields to create something new," professor Zurbuchen said.

More info about the subject is available on U-M website, here.

FETTU's webpage is available here.

The winner receives 3500 Euros, the first runner-up receives 1500 Euros, and the two second runners-ups each 750 Euros. The awards and certificates will be handed over in March during the Communicating Astronomy with the Public 2010 Conference, in Cape Town, South Africa. Kimberly Kowal Arcand, FETTU co-chair together with Megan Watzke, will give a keynote talk at the conference. FETTU, is led by the NASA Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass., USA.

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) featured tens of thousands of events worldwide. These were organised and implemented by many professionals, amateurs and volunteers who built IYA2009 into the most successful science education and public outreach project ever undertaken. While it is impossible to acknowledge all the activities that have taken place in 2009 and all those who have made them possible, an IYA2009 Prize for Excellence in Astronomy Education and Public Outreach has been established to reward some of the most ambitious.

Thirty submissions were accepted from 21 countries and nine transnational organisations. After a very careful evaluation of all submissions, and much difficult deliberation, From Earth to the Universe was selected as the winner.

From Earth to the Universe showcases the incredible variety of astronomical images available today. The exhibit shows how astronomical objects look when viewed across the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultraviolet and visible light to infrared, X-rays and gamma rays.

FETTU continues to be shown in non-traditional public venues such as parks and gardens, shopping malls, metro stations and airports in major cities across the world.

FETTU images have been selected for their stunning beauty and ability to engage members of the general public who might normally ignore or avoid astronomy.

With short but informative captions on each panel, FETTU introduces the basics of the science behind each image, adding to and extending the visual impact.

The FETTU project, partly supported by NASA, involves more than 500 exhibits in more than 70 countries of the most beautiful and inspiring large-format astronomical images. The project is a grassroots initiative, which took an innovative approach, making all material freely available as an open source approach to education and public outreach.

FETTU has already exhibitions planed for 2010 in more than 30 countries.

"We are really pleased to award the prize to From Earth to the Universe, a project which has really captured the spirit of the contest and of IYA2009 as a whole." says Dr. Mani Bhaumik, the IYA2009 Patron.

Three additional projects from the very high quality field were selected as runners-up in the contest. The first is Around the World in 80 Telescopes, a 24-hour live webcast presenting observatories and astronomical research around the world, part of the global project, 100 Hours of Astronomy. The webcast featured eighty professional telescopes in seven continents and reached well over 110 000 viewers in 24 hours and many more are still watching online every day from all around the world.

The Galileoscope and Galileo Teacher Training Program shared the second runners-up prize, for their outstanding contributions to all aspects of education during IYA2009.
The Galileo Teacher Training Program helped more than 5000 educators in more than 40 countries improve their methods of teaching astronomy and bringing it to the classroom, while the Galileoscope project created a low-cost telescope kit that enabled children and adults worldwide to relive Galileo's sense of discovery. More than 180 000 of these have been produced and distributed to individuals, astronomy clubs, planetariums, science centres, museums, schools and other group.

"It was very difficult to select the winners as so many initiatives deserve acclaim for what they've done. All of the projects help contribute to the legacy of IYA2009 and its important mission of astronomy education and public outreach." says Ian Corbett, IAU General Secretary and member of the prize jury. "Those on our final list showed ambition and scope far above and beyond conventional science communication ventures, and this was an important factor in our decision."

Read more about the subject here.

"Learning nouns activates the left fusiform gyrus, while learning verbs switches on other regions", says Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells, co-author of the study and researcher at the Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit of the University of Barcelona, as it is stated in a news release of Plataforma SINC.

The Catalan researcher, along with psychologist Anna Mestres-Missé (the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany) and neurologist Thomas F. Münte (the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany) have published the results of their study confirming the neural differences in the map of the brain when a person learns new nouns and verbs.

More details here.

The image of NGC 346 that spans about 200 light-years was obtained using an instrument at the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Images like this help astronomers chronicle star birth and evolution, while offering glimpses of how stellar development influences the appearance of the cosmic environment over time.

More info, including press release, images, and videos are available here.

The PhD thesis is entitled "Development of a new nanocompound material made of zirconia with coated carbon nanotubes, for orthopaedic applications".

According to the paper, carbon nanotubes were added to the zirconia matrix - a technique that greatly strengthens its resistance. The nanotubes were coated with nanoparticles of zirconia and, in order for this to be effected, the nanoparticles were heated beyond their boiling point.

Adding zirconia nanoparticles to the nanotubes facilitates the dispersion of the material and reduces its viscosity, apart from helping to increase its density for the next and last stage, the synterisation stage (this is a process, particularly used in ceramics, in order to transform the material from powder to a compact solid).

If the aim is to obtain the maximum possible density (98%), in order to start the composition, 1% of its volume must be of coated nanotubes. Finally, the material has to be synterised in argon for one hour at 1,300 degrees; not more nor less.

Much more details are available here.

Cross -country skiers are able to kick and glide because of the way the wax and the physical structure of the ski and its base interact with the snow. When the skier presses down on one ski during a kick, the wax and ski base grip the snow, enabling the skier to push off and glide on the other ski.

Felix Breitschädel, a PhD candidate at NTNU, who is in Vancouver with the Norwegian national team, says ski preparation specialists that travel with racing teams have developed a four-step process that helps them decide how the skis should be prepared and what will work best.

The steps are:

1) Different skis are tested on the track the day of the race to see what works best.

2) Once a ski itself has been chosen, the prep specialists go to work to create a micro structure on the ski base that will work in specific snow conditions. This structure is tested prior to the race.

3) Just a few hours before the race, the prep specialists have to test different waxes and wax combinations and wax the skis, which are then tested.

4) Just minutes before the race, the base of the ski is fine-tuned.

Much more info is available here.