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Technology designed to measure water vapour on Mars is poised for use in a whole host of everyday applications here on Earth from monitoring food production or industrial gas emissions, to surveying volcanic ash clouds and even giving a farmer a health check on their crops.

STFC is pleased to announce the awarding of £1.5M to fund seven exciting multidisciplinary projects under the challenge led CLASP Programme to meet specific challenges in the Environment sector.

STFC congratulates Dr Stephen Myers, Director of Accelerators and Technology at CERN, who has been awarded an OBE in Her Majesty the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2013.

A novel process for selecting and examining protein microcrystals, which can be essential for understanding biological functions, is expected to save precious research days and resources and lead to faster breakthroughs in healthcare

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) today (13 June 2013) announced that it has signed an agreement with NVIDIA, the world leader in visual and high-performance computing, to develop GPU-based supercomputers that aim to be a thousand times more powerful than any in the UK today.

Teachers across the country are going ‘back to school’ this week (9-11th June 2013) to find out about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and how the science behind it can be used to inspire school pupils to take up careers in science.

Scientists studying tiny wood-boring beetles have taken an important step in the quest to turn old rubbish such as paper and wood into liquid fuel.

The European Astronomy Journalism Prize 2013 launched today has been expanded to now include entries from Europe and South America.

An update to the European Strategy for particle physics announced today (30 May 2013) will guide UK priorities in the coming years.

The next meeting of the Projects Peer Review Panel (PPRP) will take place in Lecture Theatre 3 on 3rd and 4th July 2013, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ.

The Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, has appointed Dr Brian Bowsher to the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council with immediate effect until 31 March 2016.

Inspiring the next generation of scientists in the North West is a challenge, one that has been made a little bit easier thanks to the donation of numerous pieces of experimental equipment by staff from the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC’s) Daresbury Laboratory to the Catalyst Discovery Centre in Cheshire.

STFC’s Central Laser Facility is host to a range of advanced laser systems that are super fast, super precise and super intense. A multi-national community of chemists, biologists and physicists are using them to unlock a wealth of solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s problems, from studying cancer cells to future clean energy.

Our Daresbury Laboratory is asking Year 9 students to tell us their answers! In the 2013 School Science Prize, students must write 500 words on ‘Why I love Science’.

Nuclear physicists at the ISOLDE radioactive-beam facility at CERN, including a number from the universities of York and Manchester, have for the first time measured the radioactive properties of astatine, the rarest element on earth.

Experimental results obtained using the Gemini laser in STFC’s Central Laser Facility and published in Nature Communications are the first to demonstrate that laser light reflected from a ultrathin foil mirror moving close to the speed of light can be upshifted in energy, a demonstration of one of Einstein’s special relativity concepts first published in his ‘On the electrodynamics of moving bodies’ 1905 paper.

Existing theories on the shape and structure of atomic nuclei have been put to the test as an international team of nuclear physicists have discovered that some can be ‘pear’ shaped. This research, co-funded by STFC at the ISOLDE radioactive beam facility at CERN, has been published as the front cover story for prestigious journal, Nature, 9 May 2013

Budding young entrepreneurs from across the North West faced a panel of judges at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory today, for the area final of the 50th Young Enterprise Company Programme competition.

Less than a year after the decision to site the revolutionary Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Southern Africa and Australia, the SKA Organisation has opened its new international headquarters.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has today (3 May 2013) signed an agreement that makes the UK an associate member of FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) currently under construction next to the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, in Darmstadt, Germany.