For those of you who went to this year’s AAAS meeting in Boston, now is a chance to sip coffee, recover from jet lag and go over all those indecipherable notes you took so hastily. For those of you who didn’t go, I hope that my blog has given you a taster of the symposia […]
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“Is the title an oxymoron?” Harold Shapiro asked rhetorically at the beginning of his talk, The Responsible Use of Public Resources in Elementary Particle Physics. He wanted to show how one goes about prioritizing funding within the US science budget for high-energy physics. Later in his talk he posed another rhetorical question: “Are we in […]
Don Geesman of Argonne National Laboratory is well-known not only for his work on quarks but also for serenading his audience with folk songs about underground neutrino detectors (“For it’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew/where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too”). Although we were not so fortunate to experience […]
There’s not a fantastic selection of freebies at this year’s AAAS meeting, although there are one or two gems. A brain that sticks to walls, a pen that unfolds at the push of a button and — if you can make it past the dark sunglasses and curly-wired earphones of the agents at the FBI […]
The US science funding cuts revealed in last year’s omnibus bill were a terrific blow to US physicists, with Fermilab in particular being forced to lay-off 200 of its staff. If it doesn’t recover, the US might find that key research and development institutions begin to settle elsewhere. “It takes something like the race to […]
It’s not often that journalists are the ones being quoted. And going by the attendance of this afternoon’s symposium, Global warming heats up: how the media covers climate change, a lot of people were eager to find out what they have to say for themselves. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times gave several reasons […]
Nanotechnology has proved to be a gold mine for applied physics, and by 2015 recent predictions suggest that it could have generated a $1 trillion global market. That’s not very surprising: new applications for nanotechnology seem to crop up every day. Only this week, physicsworld.com reported on an electricity-generating fabric that could be woven from […]
