“The meeting was extraordinarily successful in helping to bring people together,” says Siegbert Rather, director for physical sciences at the United Nations Educa-tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which organized the event. “There was a resounding ‘yes’ to take the project forward.” Some 70 participants attended the meeting, including delegates representing governments from the Middle […]
Fukumura and colleagues used a scanning Hall probe microscope to study the formation of the bubbles. The compound that they studied is unusual in that its magnetic structure changes markedly with temperature. As the temperature drops, the material becomes more antiferromagnetic (that is, the magnetic moments of neighbouring layers point in opposite directions). This effect […]
Charge-parity (CP) symmetry implies that particles and antiparticles behave like mirror images of each other. Charge conjugation changes particles into their antiparticles – e.g., electrons become positrons and so on – while parity-reversal is a special type of reflection in which all three directions of space are reversed. In 1964 Andrei Sakharov showed that CP […]
Researchers have been worried about the discrepancy between the experimental data and simulations at Super-Kamiokande for some time. According to the simulations, the experiment was detecting too few muon neutrino events or too many electron neutrinos. Boezio and others decided to tackle the discrepancy by making measurements in the atmosphere. Atmospheric neutrinos are created by […]
Read article: Gemini telescope passes first hurdle
Gemini-North is situated on top of Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano some 4200 meters above sea level. Mauna Kea is a popular location for telescopes because of its high altitude and clear skies. The 8-meter Gemini telescopes are the latest in a new generation of large telescopes that already includes the two 10-metre Keck telescopes […]
The experiment also found that changes in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field with latitude do not alter the number of low-energy protons hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. However the experiment failed to detect any anti-helium atoms among the three million ordinary helium atoms that it detected. The two main goals of the experiment are […]
The photonic crystal was made by using an ion beam to drill a 2D hexagonal array of holes in a layer of indium gallium arsenide phosphide (InGaAsP). The regular spacing of the holes means that only certain wavelengths of light can propagate in the crystal. The holes were 515 nm apart and had a radius […]
The Earth’s average global temperature has increased by 0.6 Kelvin in the past 100 years. There are believed to be four main processes that can effect the Earth’s climate. Two of these, small aerosol particles from volcanic eruptions and changes in solar luminosity, occur naturally. The other two, sulphate aerosols and greenhouse gases such as […]
Read article: Neutrino lab sees “first light”
The observatory is a joint project between Canada, the US and the UK, and was officially opened last year. It is the first detector that is capable of distinguishing between the three different types of neutrino – electron, muon and tau neutrinos. Neutrinos are generated by nuclear reactions deep inside the sun, by cosmic ray […]
Richard Feynman, both as a man and as a scientist, excited varied reactions: you either loved him or you hated him. As a man, he was either narrow-minded and sexist, or else charming and completely fair in the most unselfconscious way. As a scientist, he was either “a magician” – the most impressive kind of […]
