Helbing and co-workers have identified six different traffic phases: homogeneous congestion, oscillatory congestion, triggered stop-and-go traffic, moving localised clusters, pinned localised clusters, and free traffic. One axis of their phase diagram represents the flow of vehicles already on the motorway, while the other represents vehicles joining the motorway. Transitions between the states are triggered by […]
The report has already led to security being tightened at all laboratories run the Department of Energy, including those at Los Alamos and Livermore. Fears over the new security regime – visitors from “sensitive” countries such as India, China and Russia now require special permission from Bill Richardson, head of the DOE, to attend the […]
The Hubble team, led by Wendy Freedman of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has spent the last eight years using the telescope to make more accurate measurements of the Hubble constant – the rate at which the universes expands. The team’s final result this is that the Hubble constant is 70 kilometres […]
In 1980 Klaus von Klitzing discovered that the so-called Hall conductance across a material varied in steps, not continuously, as the magnetic field was changed. In other words the Hall effect was quantized. The size of the steps was related to the charge of the electron. In 1982 Störmer and Tsui discovered the fractional quantum […]
The new technique works because the salt water conducts electricity. As the voltage on the tape changes, electrical charge carriers are injected into the nanotubes. These form electrolyte ions near the surface of the tape. On the cathode side of the tape, electrons are attracted to the nanotubes and cause them to expand. On the […]
Aldermaston has over 4000 employees and a budget of £300m. Over half of this (£168m) is spent on the manufacture, maintenance and testing of nuclear weapons, and on related research. Another £91m is spent on the Trident nuclear weapons programme and £11m goes on dismantling nuclear weapons. According to the report, a shift in emphasis […]
Snow avalanches occur when the mass of the snow overcomes the frictional resistance of the slope. This usually takes place when snow layers near the slope are loosened by spring rains or vibrations. Daerr and Douady coated an inclined felt surface with layers of the beads, making sure that the beads remained static on the […]
Wil van Breugel from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands found their galactic nucleus by looking for radio sources that generate strong radio waves over a narrow band from a single power source. They looked for optical candidates of these sources at near […]
The JIF scheme is funded by the government and the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest biomedical research charity. It was established after several reports found that a shortage of state-of-the-art research equipment was making it difficult for universities in the UK to remain at the forefront of international research. Nearly £150m has been awarded to […]
The ESA Council meeting, held in Brussels over the past two days, also formalised closer ties to the European Union. ESA hopes that the EU will become a major new source of funds for some of the industrial programmes such as Galileo, a joint ESA/EU global navigation system. A final decision on the future of […]
