The fifth framework will focus on four main themes: quality of life and management of living systems (ECU 2.413 bn); the user-friendly information society (ECU 3.6 bn); competitive and sustainable growth (ECU 2.705 bn); and energy, environment and sustainable development (ECU 2.125 bn). Its three other main activities are: confirming the international role of community […]
One of the women, Mary Singleton, has been complaining about the inequality for 20 years and says that in 1986 the lab’s management board admitted that female staff were discriminated against. However the board took no action. Singleton, who retired last year, used to manage Livermore’s plutonium facility. “The regents and management at the lab […]
It was in 1867, in a letter to his friend and colleague Peter Tait, that James Clerk Maxwell first stated his renowned “demon paradox”. He imagined a vessel with two compartments, separated by a controllable door, with a demon that allowed hot molecules to accumulate on one side, and cold molecules on the other. The […]
Transforming the Soviet Union’s highly centralized communist regime into an open, democratic society based on free-market principles has proved to be much harder than people at first thought. Life has been painful for almost all levels of society in the former Soviet nations since the early 1990s, and the relatively small – but important – […]
Read article: Mutual attractions: physics and finance
The international financial markets are proving profitable for physicists who can apply techniques from theoretical and statistical physics to the complex dynamics of financial products
One of the central questions is how to manipulate or “engineer” these entangled states in real physical systems. Indeed, very few physical systems satisfy the stringent requirements that make it possible to control the quantum mechanical Hamilton operator – which determines the time evolution of the system – while at the same time ensuring that […]
All of the other research councils will get increases of at least 3%, with the Medical Research Council receiving a rise of 6.8%. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will get an extra £86m, representing a real-terms rise of 3.5%, but £60m of this will have to underpin work in the life sciences. […]
Astronomers have known for decades that the universe is expanding, based on measurements of the “red shift” of light emitted by galaxies. According to the standard cosmological model, there are three possible types of universe: a “closed universe” in which there is enough mass to eventually stop the expansion and cause the universe to collapse […]
The gravitational constant was first measured by Lord Cavendish in 1798, who used a torsion-balance to measure the force between a pair of lead spheres. Cavendish measured G to be 6.754 x 10-11 metres cubed per kilogram per second squared. Although this technique has been refined many times, it is still subject to a number […]
Donald Umstadter and co-workers used a neodymium-glass laser to illuminate helium gas in a vacuum chamber. The team were able to focus 4 trillion watts of power on the gas. The electric field of the laser pulses ionizes the gas and causes the free electrons to oscillate back-and-forth in a straight line. The magnetic field […]
