Astrobiology is a very broad interdisciplinary field covering the origin, evolution, distribution, and destiny of life in the universe, as well as the design and implementation of missions for solar system exploration. A review covering its complete spectrum has been missing at a level accessible even to the non-specialist.
The last section of the book consists of a supplement, including a glossary, notes, and tables, which represent highly condensed windows' into research ranging from basic sciences to earth and life sciences, as well as the humanities.
These additions should make The New Science of Astrobiology accessible to a wide readership: scientists, humanists, and the general reader will have an opportunity to participate in one of the most rewarding activities of contemporary culture.

It is good to mark the new Millennium by looking back as well as forward. Whatever Shines Should Be Observed looks to the nineteenth century to celebrate the achievements of five distinguished women, four of whom were born in Ireland while the fifth married into an Irish family, who made pioneering contributions to photography, microscopy, astronomy and astrophysics.

The women featured came from either aristocratic or professional families. Thus, at first sight, they had many material advantages among their peers. In the ranks of the aristocracy there was often a great passion for learning, and the mansions in which these families lived contained libraries, technical equipment (microscopes and telescopes) and collections from the world of nature. More modest professional households of the time were rich in books, while activities such as observing the stars, collecting plants etc. typically formed an integral part of the children's education.

To balance this it was the prevailing philosophy that boys could learn, in addition to basic subjects, mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry and classical languages, while girls were channelled into 'polite' subjects like music and needlework. This arrangement allowed boys to progress to University should they so wish, where a range of interesting career choices (including science and engineering) was open to them. Girls, on the other hand, usually received their education at home, often under the tutelage of a governess who would not herself had had any serious contact with scientific or technical subjects. In particular, progress to University was not during most of the nineteenth century an option for women, and access toscientific libraries and institutions was also prohibited.

Although those women with aristocratic and professional backgrounds were in a materially privileged position and had an opportunity to 'see' through the activities of their male friends and relatives how professional scientific life was lived, to progress from their places in society to the professions required very special determination. Firstly, they had to individually acquire scientific and technical knowledge, as well as necessary laboratory methodology, without the advantage of formal training. Then, it was necessary to carve out a niche in a particular field, despite the special difficulties attending the publication of scientific books or articles by a woman. There was no easy road to science, or even any well worn track. To achieve recognition was a pioneering activity without discernible ground rules.

With the hindsight of history, we recognise that the heroic efforts which the women featured in this volume made to overcome the social constraints that held them back from learning about, and participating in, scientific and technical subjects, had a consequence on a much broader canvas. In addition to what they each achieved professionally they contributed within society to a gradual erosion of those barriers raised against the participation of women in academic life, thereby assisting in allowing University places and professional opportunities to gradually become generally available. It is a privilege to salute and thank the wonderful women of the nineteenth century herein described for what they have contributed to the women of today. William Herschel's famous motto quicquid nitet notandum (whatever shinesshould be observed) applies in a particular way to the luminous quality of their individual lives, and those of us who presently observe their shining, as well as those who now wait in the wings of the coming centuries to emerge upon the scene, can each see a little further by their light.

This book presents novel observational evidence toward detecting and characterizing the products of massive, interacting binary stars. As a majority of massive stars are born in close binary systems, a large number of so-called massive binary interaction products are predicted to exist; however, few have been identified so far. Based on observations with the largest telescopes around the world, equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, this book helps to remedy this situation. In her outstanding PhD-thesis Julia Bodensteiner identifies a new class of post-interaction binaries in a short-lived phase just briefly after the initially more massive star has been stripped of part of its envelope. She further provides new evidence for the Be phenomenon to largely result from binary interactions. These results represented a new and testable prediction for the evolution of these stars and opened up a new way forward for identifying hundreds of post-interaction products. Finally, using the MUSE integral field spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the author presents a novel spectroscopic campaign focusing on the 40 Myr-old star cluster NGC 330 in the Small Magellanic Clouds. Combined with photometric observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, the MUSE data allow to characterize the entire massive star population of NGC 330, revealing their multiplicity properties and rotational velocities and providing unique observational constraints on their (binary) evolution history. This is made possible by the developments of novel numerical methods allowing to extract star spectra from the MUSE integral field spectroscopic data and to characterize their properties by the simultaneous comparison of MUSE spectroscopy and Hubble photometry with atmospheric models. This book is a partly re-written version of the author's thesis offering a highly readable coherent text presenting not only new insights into the properties of binary interaction products but also giving students an excellent introduction into the field.

The uses of time in astronomy - from pointing telescopes, coordinating and processing observations, predicting ephemerides, cultures, religious practices, history, businesses, determining Earth orientation, analyzing time-series data and in many other ways - represent a broad sample of how time is used throughout human society and in space. Time and its reciprocal, frequency, is the most accurately measurable quantity and often an important path to the frontiers of science. But the future of timekeeping is changing with the development of optical frequency standards and the resulting challenges of distributing time at ever higher precision, with the possibility of timescales based on pulsars, and with the inclusion of higher-order relativistic effects. The definition of the second will likely be changed before the end of this decade, and its realization will increase in accuracy; the definition of the day is no longer obvious. The variability of the Earth's rotation presents challenges of understanding and prediction. In this symposium speakers took a closer look at time in astronomy, other sciences, cultures, and business as a defining element of modern civilization. The symposium aimed to set the stage for future timekeeping standards, infrastructure, and engineering best practices for astronomers and the broader society. At the same time the program was cognizant of the rich history from Harrison's chronometer to today's atomic clocks and pulsar observations. The theoreticians and engineers of time were brought together with the educators and historians of science, enriching the understanding of time among both experts and the public.

The year: 1660. The date: November 28. Present: The Lord Brouncker, Mr Boyle, Mr Bruce, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paule Neile, Dr Wilkins, Dr Goddard, Dr Petty, Mr Ball, Mr Hooke, Mr Wren, and Mr Hill. Occasion: A lecture by Mr Wren at Gresham College, United Kingdom. AfterChristopherWrenhaddeliveredhislectureatGreshamCollegeonthathistoric occasion in November 1660, "they did according to the usual manner, withdraw for mutual converse." It was in 1660 that the Royal Society was founded, with 12 persons present. This year, 2010, is thus a special year for scientists worldwide: it celebrates the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society, whose current President is Martin Rees. One of the enormous challenges facing scientists in the 1600s was the great need fortheclassi cationofobjectstheywerestudying,particularlyinthe eldofbotany. The seeds for classi cation lie in the works of the British naturalist John Ray (1628-1705), who commencing in 1660 with hisCatalogusplantarumcirca Cantabrigiamnascentium (Catalogue of Cambridge Plants) - published in the year in which the Royal Society was founded - and ending with the posthumous publi- tion ofSynopsisMethodicaAviumetPiscium in 1713, pioneered systematic studies on plants, birds, mammals, sh, and insects.

Relativistic Astrophysics and Cosmology offers a succinct and self-contained treatment of general relativity and its application to compact objects, gravitational waves and cosmology. The required mathematical concepts are introduced informally, following geometrical intuition as much as possible. The approach is theoretical, but there is ample discussion of observational aspects and of instrumental issues where appropriate.

The book includes such topical issues as the Gravity Probe B mission, interferometer detectors of gravitational waves, and the physics behind the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Written for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in (astro)physics, it is ideally suited for a lecture course and contains 140 exercises with extensive hints. The reader is assumed to be familiar with linear algebra and analysis, ordinary differential equations, special relativity, and basic thermal physics.

The 1994 Cargese Summer Institute on Frontiers in Partide Physics was organized by the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris (M. Levy), the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris (J. Iliopoulos), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (R. Gastmans), and the Uni- versite Catholique de Louvain (J. -M. Gerard), which, since 1975, have joined their efforts and worked in common. It was the eleventh Summer Institute on High Energy Physics organized jointly at Cargese by three of these universities. Severa! new frontiers in partide physics were thoroughly discussed at this school. the new euergy range in deep-iuelastic electron-proton scattering is beiug In particular, explored by HERA (DESY, Hamburg), and Professor A. De Roeck described the first results from the H1 and Zeus experiments, while Professors A. H. Mueller aud Z. Kuuszt discussed their relevance from the theoretical point of view. Also, the satellite exper- iments offer new possibilities for exploring the links between astrophysics, cosmology, and partide physics. A critica] a. nalysis of these experiments was performed by Pro- fessor B. Sadoulet, and Professor M. Spiro made the connection with the results from earth-based neutrino experiments. Finally, much attentiou was giveu to the latest re- sults from the TEVATRON (Fermilab, USA), showing further evidence for the loug awaited top quark. Professor A. Tollestrup gave a detailed presentation of these results aud discussed their importance for the Standard Model.

This thesis is devoted to ANTARES, the first underwater neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean sea. As the main scientific analysis, a search for high-energy neutrino emission from the region of the Fermi bubbles has been performed using data from the ANTARES detector. A method for the background estimation using off-zones has been developed specially for this measurement. A new likelihood for the limits calculation which treats both observations in the on-zone and in the off-zone in the similar way and also includes different systematic uncertainties has been constructed. The analysis of 2008-2011 ANTARES data yielded a 1.2 excess of events in the Fermi bubble regions, compatible with the no-signal hypothesis. For the optimistic case of no energy cutoff in the flux, the upper limit is within a factor of three of the prediction of the purely hadronic model based on the measured gamma-ray flux. The sensitivity improves as more data are accumulated (more than 65% gain in the sensitivity is expected once 2012-2016 data are added to the analysis).

Much has been said and written about the abilities of modern instrumentation to help solve problems of combustion in engines. In the main, however, the design and fabr ication of combustion chambers continues to be based on extrapolation of exper ience gained from use and rig tests, with little input from advanced techniques such as those based on optical diagnotics. At the same time, it has become increasingly difficult to design better combustion chambers without knowledge of the relevant flow processes. Thus, the future must involve improved understanding which, in turn, will require detailed measurements of velocity, temperature and concentration. The need to narrow the gap between current industrial practice and the acquisition and implementation of improved techniques motivated the organization of the Advanced Study Institute upon which this volume is based. This Institute on Instrumentation for Combustion and Flow in Engines was arranged to display the needs of industry and the possibilities made available by modern instrumentation and, at the same time, to make clear the relative advantages of optical and probe techniques. Held at Vimeiro during the period from 13 to 26 September, 1987, the Institute was attended by 120 participants and 16 invited lecturers.

Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have been gazing up at the stars with wonder for thousands of years. Since then, mankind has systematically expanded our cosmic possibilities. What were once flights of fancy and dreams of science fiction writers have become nearly routine - a continuous human presence orbiting the Earth, probes flying beyond our solar system, and men walking on the moon. NASA and the Russian space program make traveling to the stars look easy, but it has been far from that. Space travel is a sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous, and always dangerous journey fraught with perils around every corner that most of us have never heard of or have long since forgotten. Space Oddities brings these unknown, offbeat, and obscure stories of space to life. From the showmanship and bravado of the earliest known space fatality, German Max Valier, to the first ever indictment under the Espionage Act on an Army officer who leaked secrets concerning the development of early U.S. rockets; and the story of a single loose bolt that defeated the Soviet Union's attempt to beat America to the moon. Author Joe Cuhaj also sheds light on the human aspects of space travel that have remained industry secrets - until now: how the tradition of using a musical playlist to wake astronauts up began, fascinating tales about inventions like the Fischer Space Pen, Omega watches, and even Tang breakfast drink. In addition to fun and entertaining space trivia, Space Oddities also features stories of the profound impact that space travel has had on challenges right here at home, like the effort by civil rights leaders and activists in the 1960s to bring the money from the space program back home to those in need on Earth; NASA's FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Training) program and the 25 women who were selected to become astronauts in 1960, but were denied a chance at flying even after successfully completing the rigorous astronaut training program; and, the animals who many times sacrificed their lives to prove that man could fly in space. Filled with rare and little-known stories, Space Oddities will bring the final frontier to the homes of diehard space readers and armchair astronauts alike.

Recent advances in observational and theoretical efforts in understanding the nature of cataclysmic variables had reached such maturity that there existed a strong, shared feeling among the workers in this field that an international colloquium sponsored by the International Astronomical Union would be timely. To be more specific, this was due primarily to the accumulation of the new data from satellite observatories, such as the International Ultraviolet Observatory (IUE) and EXOSAT, as well as ground-based optical and radio telescopes, and the advances in modeling the putative accretion disks and the thermo-nuclear run-away phenomena in the vinicity of the white dwarf stars in cataclysmic variables. A series of workshops on this subject held in North America over the past several years and that held in Europe in 1985 had all contributed to the advances in our knowledge that led to IAU Colloguium No. 93, held in Bamberg from the 16th to 19th of June 1986. In all, 157 astronomers from 27 countries participated in this conference. Judging from the papers presented, both invited and contributed, and from the enthusiasm seen in discussions, the meeting was indeed a success.

This book contains the proceedings of IAU Symposium No. 151 Evolutionary Processes in Interacting Binary Stars, ' which was held from 5 to 9 August 1991 in Cord ba, Argentina. The primary aim of this conference was to review and evaluate our current understanding of the evolutionary processes in wide variety of interacting binary stars from their births to their deaths. Subjects included the formation of binaries, mass flow and transfer, accretion processes, and binaries with collapsed components, such as novae, X-ray binaries and binary pulsars. As the field covered is both broad and diverse, there were in all thirty-seven invited talks; sixty-two contributed papers were also presented. In addition, these proceedings contain comments from a panel discussion of the major unsolved problems of interacting binary stars.

In the recent years, space-based observation methods have led to a subst- tially improved understanding of Earth system. Geodesy and geophysics are contributing to this development by measuring the temporal and spatial va- ations of the Earth's shape, gravity ?eld, and magnetic ?eld, as well as at- sphere density. In the frame of the GermanR&D programmeGEOTECHNO- LOGIEN,researchprojectshavebeen launchedin2002relatedto the satellite missions CHAMP, GRACE and ESA's planned mission GOCE, to comp- mentary terrestrial and airborne sensor systems and to consistent and stable high-precision global reference systems for satellite and other techniques. In the initial 3-year phase of the research programme (2002-2004), new gravity ?eld models have been computed from CHAMP and GRACE data which outperform previous models in accuracy by up to two orders of m- nitude for the long and medium wavelengths. A special highlight is the - termination of seasonal gravity variations caused by changes in continental water masses. For GOCE, to be launched in 2006, new gravity ?eld analysis methods are under development and integrated into the ESA processing s- tem. 200,000 GPS radio occultation pro?les, observed by CHAMP, have been processed on an operational basis. They represent new and excellent inf- mation on atmospheric refractivity, temperature and water vapor. These new developments require geodetic space techniques (such as VLBI, SLR, LLR, GPS) to be combined and synchronized as if being one global instrument.

The mystery of the diffuse interstellar bands has been variously a curiosity, a co nundrum, and a nuisance for astronomers in the seven decades since the features were first noticed, but recently they have become a forefront issue in astrophysics. Ever since Paul Merrill, in a series of papers starting in 1934, pointed out the interstellar and unidentified nature of the bands, a Who's Who of twentieth century astronomers have tried their hands at solving the problem of identifying the carriers. Henry Norris Russell, Pol Swings, Otto Struve, Paul Ledoux, W. W. Morgan, Walter Adams, Jesse Greenstein, Lawrence Aller, and Gerhard Herzberg all briefly entered the stage, only to move on quickly to other problems where the chances for progress appeared more realistic. In more recent times a number of equally prominent scientists have pursued the bands, but generally only as a sideline to their real astronomical research. But in the past decade, and particularly in the past three years, the view of the search for the diffuse band absorbers as an interesting but perhaps quixotic quest has changed. Today there are several astronomers, as well as laboratory chemists, who are devoting substantial research time and resources to the problem and, as perhaps the most reliable indicator of the newly elevated status of research in this field, some research grants have now been awarded for the study of the bands."

The Third Microquasar Workshop (or the 'Fifth' Workshop on Galactic Relativ istic Jet Sources), was held in Granada, Andalucia (Spain) on 11-13 September 2000. The aim of this workshop in Granada, following the previous Microquasar Workshops in Greenbelt (1997) and Paris (1998) and the Workshops on galactic sources with relativistic jets in Jodrell Bank (1996) and Milton Keynes (1998), was to focus on the theoretical and observational aspects of microquasars. The study of microquasars, the sources in our Galaxy displaying powerful re lativistic jets, is a rapidly advancing field in astrophysics. The new instrumentation on ground (MERLIN, SCUBA, VLA, VLT) and aboard satellites (ASCA, BSAX, ISO, IXAE and RXTE) has provided important results, and much more is expected to come from Chandra and XMM-Newton. In the further future, powerful instru mentation will come online in the sub-mm (ALMA) and gamma-rays (INTEG RAL), extending our coverage to important regions for the study of microquasars. Energy transport via relativistic jets is one of the most important physical mechan isms taking place in compact objects. Large efforts have been devoted to properly understand the disk-jet connection, and even the effects of rotation or magnetic fields. Several new important advances have been made recently, both from the point of view of the theoretical treatment of jets and the different new observational tests."

The aim of this volume of scientific essays is twofold. On the one hand, by remembering the scientific figure of Eduardo R. Caianiello, it aims at focusing on his outstanding contributions - from theoretical physics to cybernetics - which after so many years still represent occasion of innovative paths to be fruitfully followed. It must be stressed the contribution that his interdisciplinary methodology can still be of great help in affording and solving present day complex problems. On the other hand, it aims at pinpointing with the help of the scientists contributing to the volume - some crucial problems in present day research in the fields of interest of Eduardo Caianiello and which are still among the main lines of investigation of some of the Institutes founded by Eduardo (Istituto di Cibernetica del CNR, IIAS, etc).

This book represents the proceedings from the NATO sponsored Advanced Research Workshop entitled "Observational Tests of Inflation" held at the University of Durham, England on the 10th-14th December, 1990. In recent years, the cosmological inflation model has drawn together the worlds of particle physics, theoretical cosmology and observational astronomy. The aim of the workshop was to bring together experts in all of these fields to discuss the current status of the inflation theory and its observational predictions. The simplest inflation model makes clear predictions which are testable by astronomical observation. Foremost is the prediction that the cosmological density parameter, no, should have a value negligibly different from the critical, Einstein-de Sitter value of 00=1. The other main prediction is that the spectrum of primordial density fluctuations should be Gaussian and take the Harrison-Zeldovich form. The prediction that n =l, in patticular, leads to several important consequences o for cosmology. Firstly, there is the apparent contradiction with the limits on baryon density from Big Bang nucleosynthesis which has led to the common conjecture that weakly interacting particles rather than baryons may form the dominant mass constituent of the Universe. Secondly, with n =l, the age of the Universe is uncomfortably short if o the Hubble constant and the ages of the oldest star clusters lie within their currently believed limits.

Outstanding progress in near-infrared detection technology and in real-time image processing has led astronomers to start undertaking all-sky surveys in the 1--2 mum range (project DENIS in Europe and 2MASS in the U.S.A.), surveys which will have a considerable impact in various areas of astronomy. This book gathers the contributions of more than 80 specialists involved in fields of interest as different as low mass stars, late stages of stellar evolution, star formation, stellar populations of the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, the local structure of the Universe, and observational cosmology. It describes the impact on these fields of the exhaustive data bases and catalogs of stars and galaxies that these surveys will provide. The considerable interest of these documents for the future of infrared space and ground-based projects and the complementarity with other currently ongoing or planned surveys in other spectral ranges are emphasized.

Adriaan Blaauw; Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at the Universities of Groningen and Leiden, former Directo.r of the Kapteyn Laboratory and of the European Southern Observatory, celebrated his 70th anniversary on 12 April 1984. To mark this event, an international Symposium was con- vened on the subject "Birth and Evolution of Massive Stars and Stellar Groups", a subject which has played the leading role in Blaauw's scien- tific research. The present volume contains the Scientific Proceedings of that Symposium. The meeting was organized by a Committee consisting of: W.H.W.M. Boland (Secretary), W.N. Brouw, W.B. Burton, E.P.J. van den Heuvel, H. van der Laan and H. van Woerden (Chairman). Together, these six persons represented the Executive Committees of the Netherlands Foundation for Astronomical Research (ASTRON) and the Netherlands Foundation for Radio Astronomy (RZM), two organizations in which Blaauw has held key offices. The scientific program was planned in full consultation with Adri- aan Blaauw himself. Only section 5, "A profile of Adriaan Blaauw", was kept secret to him. The other four sections: Structure of star-forming regions, Stellar content of young groups, Evolution of massive stars, and Extragalactic perspective on star formation, each represent an im- portant aspect of the overall theme of the Symposium. The program in- cluded 6 major review papers, 18 invited papers, 17 contributed papers, some of which were given as posters, and ample time for discussion.

Prominences are amazing objects of great beauty whose formation, basic structure and eruption represent one of the basic unsolved problems in Solar Physics. It is now 14 years since the last book on prominences appeared (Tandberg-Hanssen, 1974), during which time much progress in our knowledge of the physics of prominences has been made, and so the time is ripe for a new text book which it is hoped will be a helpful summary of the subject for students, postdocs and solar researchers. Indeed, the last few years has seen an upsurge in interest in prominences due to high resolution ground-and space-based observations and advances in theory. For example, an IAU colloquium was held in Oslo (Jensen et al, 1978), a Solar Maximum Mission Workshop took place at Goddard Space Right Center (poland, 1986), an IAU Colloquium is planned in Yugoslavia in September 1989 in prominences and it is expected that the SOHO satellite will be a further stimulus to prominence research. In November 1987 a Workshop on the Dynamics and Structure of Solar Prominences was held in Palma Mallorca at the invitation of Jose Luis Ballester with the aim of bringing observers and theorists together and having plenty of time for in-depth discussions of the basic physics of promi nences."