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 […]
Robert Aymar, director general of CERN, gave his talk on the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider with veteran poise. The particle accelerator, he said, will reveal the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter and the essence of the primordial plasma. The results will dictate the future course of high-energy physics. It will be a […]
Visualizing data really has come a long way. It may have started with geniuses like Galileo mapping the movement sunspots as a series of sketches, but four centuries later it is all about supercomputing terabytes of data. “A graphic message has to hit you between the eyes,” said Alyssa Goodman, who was moderator at the […]
New detectors may help monitor power plants
Read article: Antineutrinos sniff out signs of nuclear-bomb making
Paul Kagame is the last person you would expect to see at a science meeting. Eighteen years ago he returned to his native Rwanda after 30 years of exile. In 1994, as the genocide against his people climaxed, he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to overthrow the incumbent government. Nine years later he became Rwanda’s […]
The first AAAS meeting was held on 20 September 1848. So, not including this one, how many meetings do you think they’ve had so far? 160? Wrong. According to page one, paragraph six of the FAQ section of the press pack, the AAAS’s meetings haven’t been as annual as they would have you believe. On […]
