It is straightforward to incorporate the obvious physical attributes of people in a crowd, like pedestrian mass and velocity, into the simulations. But Helbing’s team went on to include psychological tendencies in the model by likening them to the kinds of interaction that take place between particles. The tendency of people to stay away from […]
Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagittarius A* change significantly in only a few years, so the team were able to measure the stars’ velocities in the plane […]
The CODAG experiment recreated for the first time conditions in the early solar system in order to observe the dust clustering process. Micron-sized silicon oxide grains were injected into a chamber filled with low-pressure gas to simulate the pre-planetary nebula of dust. In the very low gravity environment of the space shuttle, it is thermal […]
Read article: The bubble bursts for shrimps
Scientists originally thought the shrimps’ snapping sound was produced by mechanical contact between opposing sides of the claw. But Barbara Schmitz, a biologist at the Technical University of Munich, and Lohse noticed during other studies that bubbles formed near the shrimps’ closing claws. They suspected that when a shrimp’s claw snaps shut, a jet of […]
Read article: Astronomers find middleweight black hole
The black hole is around 600 light years from the centre of galaxy M82. “This black hole might eventually sink to the centre of the galaxy where it may grow to become a supermassive black hole”, says Hironori Matsumoto of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lead author on one of three papers about the discovery. […]
Read article: CERN chases the Higgs
“It was a difficult decision,” admitted Roger Cashmore, CERN’s director of research to Physics Web. “We wanted to give the experiments the opportunity to better test the effect without compromising the LHC schedule.” If the experiments continue to measure the same effects, the extra data will reduce the likelihood that the observation is a statistical […]
The intense X-rays from SOLEIL will be used for a range of experiments in physics, chemistry and biology. The machine is expected to come on-line in 2005. According to Schwartzenberg, the French government will pay no more than 20% of the total costs, leaving regional and local authorities to contribute 75%, with the remaining funds […]
The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 raised hopes that loss-free superconducting power cables would be able to operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Previously, superconductors had to be cooled with liquid helium, which is much more expensive. But researchers soon found that the new polycrystalline superconductors could support only extremely low current densities at this […]
Read article: Ulysses probes the solar maximum
“Solar activity has been increasing for the past three or four years, and now Ulysses has started observing much more disturbed conditions at increasing solar latitudes,” explains Andre Balogh of Imperial College, a principal scientific investigator on the mission. “The passes over the poles of the Sun will show a different kind of interplanetary environment […]
Whereas the carbon atoms in a graphite sheet are arranged in hexagons, the fullerene form of carbon includes both pentagons and hexagons. The first fullerene to be discovered, carbon-60, contains 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons and is shaped like a football. Now Paul McEuen’s group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of […]
