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The European Space Agency's Planck satellite was launched on 14 May 2009, and has been surveying the sky stably and continuously since 13 August 2009. Its performance is well in line with expectations, and it will continue to gather scientific data until the end of its cryogenic lifetime. We give an overview of the history of Planck in its first year of operations, and describe some of the key performance aspects of the satellite. This paper is part of a package submitted in conjunction with Planck's Early Release Compact Source Catalogue, the first data product based on Planck to be released publicly. The package describes the scientific performance of the Planck payload, and presents results on a variety of astrophysical topics related to the sources included in the Catalogue, as well as selected topics on diffuse emission., Comment: This is part of a package of Planck papers labelled in their titles as "Planck Early Results". The whole package can also be downloaded from http://www.rssd.esa.int/Planck. This paper was accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics on 31 May 2011

For a finite volume geodesic polyhedron P in hyperbolic 3-space, with the property that all interior angles between incident faces are integral submultiples of Pi, there is a naturally associated Coxeter group generated by reflections in the faces. Furthermore, this Coxeter group is a lattice inside the isometry group of hyperbolic 3-space, with fundamental domain the original polyhedron P. In this paper, we provide a procedure for computing the lower algebraic K-theory of the integral group ring of such Coxeter lattices in terms of the geometry of the polyhedron P. As an ingredient in the computation, we explicitly calculate some of the lower K-groups of the dihedral groups and the product of dihedral groups with the cyclic group of order two., Comment: 35 pages, 2 figures

For a group G that splits as an amalgamation of A and B over a common subgroup C, there is an associated Waldhausen Nil-group, measuring the "failure" of Mayer-Vietoris for algebraic K-theory. Assume that (1) the amalgamation is acylindrical, and (2) the groups A,B,G satisfy the Farrell-Jones isomorphism conjecture. Then we show that the Waldhausen Nil-group splits as a direct sum of Nil-groups associated to certain (explicitly describable) infinite virtually cyclic subgroups of G. We note that a special case of an acylindrical amalgamation includes any amalgamation over a finite group C., Comment: 12 pages

A hyperbolic 3-simplex reflection group is a Coxeter group arising as a lattice in the isometry group of hyperbolic 3-space, with fundamental domain a geodesic simplex (possibly with some ideal vertices). The classification of these groups is known, and there are exactly 9 cocompact examples, and 23 non-cocompact examples. We provide a complete computation of the lower algebraic K-theory of the integral group ring of all the hyperbolic 3-simplex reflection groups., Comment: 33 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables

We prove that the Waldhausen Nil-group associated to a virtually cyclic groups that surjects onto the infinite dihedral group vanishes if and only if the corresponding Farrell Nil-group associated to the canonical index two subgroup is trivial. The proof uses the transfer map to establish one direction, and uses controlled pseudo-isotopy techniques of Farrell-Jones to establish the reverse implication., Comment: 10 pages

For $\Gamma$ a relatively hyperbolic group, we construct a model for the universal space among $\Gamma$-spaces with isotropy on the family VC of virtually cyclic subgroups of $\Gamma$. We provide a recipe for identifying the maximal infinite virtually cyclic subgroups of Coxeter groups which are lattices in $O^+(n,1)= \iso(\mathbb H^n)$. We use the information we obtain to explicitly compute the lower algebraic K-theory of the Coxeter group $\gt$ (a non-uniform lattice in $O^+(3,1)$). Part of this computation involves calculating certain Waldhausen Nil-groups for $\mathbb Z[D_2]$, $\mathbb Z[D_3]$., Comment: 24 pages, some commutative diagrams