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 […]
Under the terms of the new European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA), JET would no longer carry out one common programme of work approved by the EU. Instead, the JET facilities would be run by the UKAEA on behalf of Euratom. Visiting teams of researchers from JET’s 16 member states or “associations”, which include the UK, […]
Polymers are long chain-like molecules made up of smaller molecules called monomers. It is well known that polymer chains often tie themselves in knots, but it was not clear how this influenced the mechanical properties of the polymer. Klein and colleagues modelled what happens when a knotted polymer chain consisting of 144 carbon atoms was […]
Geophysicists realised that the Earth’s crust consisted of a series of tectonic plates when they noticed that as magma flowed out of the ocean ridges and cooled, iron in the magma magnetized in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. This field changes direction roughly every 10000 years. The material from the ocean ridge gradually […]
Astronomers have known about an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for nearly 200 years but it has only been in the past ten years that two other belts have been discovered. The Kuiper belt, a group of comets and asteroids beyond Neptune, was discovered through observations, while the region of asteroids between Neptune and […]
Read article: Atomic secrets and the red scare
Almost everyone has heard of the “Oppenheimer affair”. It took place between 1953-54 when the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, was subjected to a humiliating show trial by the Atomic Energy Commission and subsequently permanently stripped of his security clearance. But most people, including most historians of science, know little else about the […]
