Rob Gold, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, was also watching outside the mission-control center.

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Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, a leading space research center, recently conducted feasibility studies into junk-zapping lasers and garbage-collecting rockets.

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The mission operations centre is the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

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Mark Showalter is from the SETI Institute, and Hal Weaver is a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

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Data from NEAR could help answer questions about the origin and composition of asteroids, comets and the solar system, according to the mission managers at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

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The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have partnered together on a successful trial for a brain-computer interface that allows a person to control a robotic arm using only their thoughts.

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And in the current issue of Applied Physics Letters, a group led by Haroun Ahmed at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory in Britain reports another vital step, a single-electron transistor that, for the first time, amplifies its input signal (though only by a factor of 3.7, several hundred times more weakly than a conventional transistor does).

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