During the 1990s the UN and ESA organized a series of workshops to promote the development of small telescopes in countries such as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Colombia and Jordan. Over 800 astronomers have attended these workshops. And although the workshops have not led to any new telescopes in Africa, they have resulted in a […]
Electron transfer in protein results from quantum tunnelling between reduction- oxidation (redox) centres. “There’s a widely accepted idea that electrons get from one redox centre to another in a protein by travelling down a series of molecular bonds that describe a best pathway,” said Christopher Moser, one of the team. “What we’ve found is that […]
The majority of stars in the universe are believed to be in binary systems, but previously no one had produced any evidence to show that such systems could contain planets. The 20 planets that have been detected outside our solar system all orbit around single stars. “To find evidence of a planet orbiting a pair […]
Carbon nanotubes are rolled up sheets of graphite that can have lengths of about 30-100 nanometers and diameters of about a nanometer. Two years ago it was discovered that carbon nanofibres – which consist of bundles of nanotubes – could absorb hydrogen. The Chinese/US team has now synthesised extra-wide nanotubes that can store 4.2% of […]
Charles Townes has written a biography – but it is not clear if it is his own or that of the laser. The laser is now such a feature of our everyday life that the remarkable story of its birth needs to be told, and Townes does so in a clear and personal way – […]
In mid-December 1900 Max Planck presented a series of papers to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin that were, eventually, to revolutionize not only physics as a discipline, but our entire conceptions of the constitution of matter and energy. It would be fair to say that the century that followed was the century of […]
A more detailed review by Phil Anderson of Princeton University, US is in the November issue of Physics World magazine. This delightfully written little book is full of typically Dysonian intellectual sparkle. It is based on three public lectures given at the New York Public Library in 1997, in which the physicist Freeman Dyson looked […]
Read article: Isidor Isaac Rabi: walking the path of God
I I Rabi's work on the magnetic properties of nuclei, including the development of nuclear magnetic resonance, and his role as a peace campaigner during the Cold War have had profound and far-reaching effects throughout physics
Read article: Superconductor stripes move on
There is an old joke about a farmer who has a hen that will not lay eggs. After consulting unsuccessfully with a biologist, and then a chemist, he finally turns to a theoretical physicist. Several days later, the physicist announces that he has solved the problem: “First we assume a spherical chicken…” This story is […]
