The Nobel Foundation celebrates its 100th birthday this year. Peter Rodgers looks at how the winners are selected and some of the discoveries that might be recognized this year
Read article: Countdown to the Nobel prize
Superconducting magnets are a common tool in many physics and chemistry laboratories, and are used in a host of research applications, including solid-state physics, nuclear-magnetic-resonance chemistry and particle physics. Outside the research lab, the only truly widespread use of superconducting magnets is in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in medicine. However, applications of superconducting magnets are […]
Read article: Superconductivity leaves the lab
Over the past 15 years there have been significant increases in the coverage of science in the mass media and the number of hands-on science centres in the UK, two developments that would be expected to foster better “public understanding of science”. But as noted in Who’s Misunderstanding Whom? (see links), a new report on […]
Read article: Beyond understanding 2
Computer chips are made using a process called optical lithography, in which light traces out patterns on a photosensitive substrate covering the silicon. The problem for chipmakers who want to make ever smaller components is that materials needed for lenses and other optical components are not effective at wavelengths below the ultraviolet. Optical lithography therefore […]
The Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the velocity of a galaxy increases with distance, is one of the most fundamental constants in cosmology. Astronomers can only obtain an accurate value for the constant using ‘standard candles’, which give reliable and accurate measurements of the distance to receding galaxies. One such class of […]
It is straightforward to incorporate the obvious physical attributes of people in a crowd, like pedestrian mass and velocity, into the simulations. But Helbing’s team went on to include psychological tendencies in the model by likening them to the kinds of interaction that take place between particles. The tendency of people to stay away from […]
Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagittarius A* change significantly in only a few years, so the team were able to measure the stars’ velocities in the plane […]
The CODAG experiment recreated for the first time conditions in the early solar system in order to observe the dust clustering process. Micron-sized silicon oxide grains were injected into a chamber filled with low-pressure gas to simulate the pre-planetary nebula of dust. In the very low gravity environment of the space shuttle, it is thermal […]
Scientists originally thought the shrimps’ snapping sound was produced by mechanical contact between opposing sides of the claw. But Barbara Schmitz, a biologist at the Technical University of Munich, and Lohse noticed during other studies that bubbles formed near the shrimps’ closing claws. They suspected that when a shrimp’s claw snaps shut, a jet of […]
Read article: The bubble bursts for shrimps
“It was a difficult decision,” admitted Roger Cashmore, CERN’s director of research to Physics Web. “We wanted to give the experiments the opportunity to better test the effect without compromising the LHC schedule.” If the experiments continue to measure the same effects, the extra data will reduce the likelihood that the observation is a statistical […]
Read article: CERN chases the Higgs
