Is there a secret that makes a Stradivarius sound so good, and can modern violins match the wonderful tonal quality of this great Italian instrument, asks Colin Gough
Read article: Science and the Stradivarius
About a year ago I was asked to speak at a local women’s studies conference on mathematics, science and technology. I didn’t flatter myself at having been chosen, because nearly every local woman who was even vaguely involved with science or mathematics at a professional level had been invited to speak. Nevertheless, I had for […]
The controversy surrounding evidence for the discovery of “dark matter” particles has heated up following two conflicting talks given at a conference at the end of February. The papers were presented at the 4th International Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter/Energy in the Universe held in Marina del Ray, California. (Most of the […]
Read article: Dark-matter dispute intensifies
There was an inevitable irony in the timing of a recent report on “science and society” published by the House of Lords select committee on science and technology. The report was released the day after the UK government announced that it was going to invest £530m in the development of a superjumbo jet, and that […]
Dielectric mirrors are made of multiple layers of transparent materials, each of which reflects a small fraction of the light that hits it. At a specific layer thickness, the reflected light waves merge and amplify, intensifying the reflection. In earlier dielectric mirrors, the efficiency of the mirror fell as the angle of reflected light increased […]
Helium-3 flows without friction when it is cooled below the superfluid transition temperature of 2.6 millikelvin. In the superfluid state the helium-3 atoms, which are fermions and therefore obey the Pauli exclusion principle, form Cooper pairs which obey Bose statistics. Since the pairs do not have to obey the exclusion principle, they can all occupy […]
Allegre, a former director of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, was appointed to the government in June 1997 after a distinguished career as a geophysicist and a long association with the newly-appointed prime minister, Lionel Jospin. His controversial decisions included abandoning plans to build the SOLEIL synchrotron source in France and reducing […]
The CXB covers a range of photon energies, with a peak around 40 kiloelectron volts (keV). The soft X-ray part of the background – photon energies between about 0.5 and 2 keV – was extensively studied with ROSAT satellite, and most of it has been resolved into individual objects, mostly distant active galactic nuclei (AGN) […]
Klaus Dieter Liss from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, and colleagues have created a cavity that traps X-ray photons between two thin plates of silicon (Nature 404 371). The cavity is able to select a narrow band of X-ray wavelengths from the broad spectrum emitted by the source, and will also allow […]
Four years ago John Pendry of Imperial College, London, described how a composite copper structure could be used to create a material with negative electric permittivity, and more recently he proposed how the magnetic permeability could be made negative as well. Since the permittivity and permeability describe how the material responds to applied electric and […]
