For ‘short’ races the average speed of a world-record performance declines sharply with increasing distance. However, above a certain distance, the decline is more gentle. For both running and swimming the change in exponent occurs between about 150 and 170 seconds. This corresponds to a change from ‘anaerobic’ respiration – in which the body predominately […]
Most methods for generating entangled states rely on selecting the entangled pairs, for instance, from a large number of other non-entangled particles. However, last year Klaus Mølmer and Anders Sørenson from the University of Aarhus in Denmark proposed a method for entangling ions confined in an ion trap “to order” with a single laser pulse. […]
In 1897 Max Planck wrote the following about the question of whether women should be allowed to study at German universities: “If a woman has a special gift for the tasks of theoretical physics…I do not think it right, both personally and impersonally, to refuse her the chance and means of studying for reasons of […]
Mike Fortun and Herbert Bernstein’s book is a masterpiece – a particularly intelligent, useful and unusual book. It will constitute, I strongly believe, a solid mooring point to help us face the challenges and questions – scientific, philosophical and political – that the new century is forcing on us. The book is also refined and […]
Construction of the new synchrotron is expected to take about five years, and it will cost about £550 m to build and operate the machine over its 20 year lifetime. The Wellcome Trust will contribute about £100 m of the total cost. The Daresbury synchrotron will continue to operate for two years after the new […]
Charles Lindsey of the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Arizona and Douglas Braun of Northwest Research Associates in Colorado used data from a Doppler imager on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to measure ripples on the surface of the Sun. In standard helioseismology measurements of the motion of the surface are used to reveal what […]
The three space science missions are: STORMS, a set of three spacecraft that will be used to monitor magnetic storms in space; SOLAR ORBITER, a mission to study the surface and atmosphere of the Sun in detail; and MASTER, a mission that would drop a lander on Mars and then go on to study large […]
The group studied three different weights of paper in their experiments. Sheets of paper were place in a combustion chamber and lit by an electric wire. The propagating front of the fire was recorded by three CCD cameras. Each pixel recorded by the camera was smaller than the individual fibres in the paper, which allowed […]
The quantum of conductance, G0, is defined by a simple equation: G0=2e2/h, where e is the charge on the electron and h is the Planck constant. The conductance of an individual nanotube is predicted to be 2G0, but experiments on multiwall nanotubes have measured odd multiples of G0 and, in some cases, fractional values. Sanvito […]
The method works by solidifying a resin that hardens when exposed to light. The resin is solidified into a three-dimensional grid by placing it in the interference pattern set up by four intersecting laser beams. The pores in the resin are then filled with titanium dioxide, which is allowed to set. The resin is then […]
