Read article: Physics, technology and the Olympics
Physics, technology and the Olympics
What effect does technology have on the performance of athletes, asks Steve Haake
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Read article: Physics, technology and the Olympics
Read article: Science centres face the future
Science centres face the future
The UK is about to experience an explosion in the number of new interactive science centres. By this time next year about a dozen major new science-centre projects will have opened (see table). These large-scale capital schemes have been funded by a mixture of National Lottery grants from the Millennium Commission and money from public […]
Read article: Europa: water, water everywhere
Europa: water, water everywhere
The latest evidence comes from an analysis of the magnetic fields surrounding Europa. When a conducting body is placed inside a time-varying magnetic field, electrical currents are induced inside the conductor, which in turn produce measurable secondary magnetic fields. In this case the conductor is Europa and the magnetic field is the magnetosphere of Jupiter. […]
Argon makes a cold compound
Argon is the lightest yet of the inert gases to have formed a compound. It is difficult to persuade light inert gases to react because their outer electrons are shielded less from the electrostatic pull of the nucleus by the inner electrons that are present in heavier noble gases. Khriachtchev and co-workers created the new […]
Old galaxies, new problems
The expansion of the universe means that the light from distant galaxies is red-shifted when observed on Earth. The larger the red shift, the greater the distance to the galaxy. Moreover, when we view a galaxy with a high redshift, we are seeing it as it was billions of years ago. By measuring the red […]
Sandage and Peebles win cosmology prize
Sandage is best known for his efforts to pin down the values of the Hubble constant, the age of the Universe and its deceleration parameter through observations. Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist who has worked on problems ranging from light-element synthesis to the nature of dark matter. The awards will be presented at the Pontifical […]
Organic superconductivity
Hendrik Schon, Christian Kloc and Batlogg investigated three different acenes: anthracene (which contains three linked rings), tetracene (four) and pentacene (five). The crystals are normally insulating, but when a thin layer of the material was included in a field-effect transistor, it became superconducting. The superconducting transition temperature ranged from 2 Kelvin for pentacene to 4 […]
DNA ‘tweezers’ take shape
Bernard Yurke from Lucent Technologies in the US, Andrew Turberfield from Oxford University in the UK and Lucent, and co-workers constructed the tweezers from three separate strands of DNA. DNA molecules are chains of four different bases – adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. Adenine will only bind to thymine, and cytosine will only bind to […]
Antimatter factory opens at CERN
Unlike most experiments at CERN, the £3.2 million Antimatter Decelerator (AD) is designed to slow down particles rather than accelerate them. The antiprotons are created when high-energy protons from the lab’s Proton Synchrotron strike an iridium target. The antiprotons are siphoned off and directed towards the AD, a 188m circumference ring, where they are focussed […]
Cluster takes shape
The Rumba and Tango satellites were sent into space on board a French-Russia launcher. Over the next week they will rendezvous with the Salsa and Samba satellites that were launched on July 16. The four satellites will undergo three months of tests before beginning their two-year scientific mission. Cluster is a joint mission between ESA […]
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