Charles Lindsey of the Solar Physics Research Corporation in Arizona and Douglas Braun of Northwest Research Associates in Colorado used data from a Doppler imager on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to measure ripples on the surface of the Sun. In standard helioseismology measurements of the motion of the surface are used to reveal what […]
The quantum of conductance, G0, is defined by a simple equation: G0=2e2/h, where e is the charge on the electron and h is the Planck constant. The conductance of an individual nanotube is predicted to be 2G0, but experiments on multiwall nanotubes have measured odd multiples of G0 and, in some cases, fractional values. Sanvito […]
The group studied three different weights of paper in their experiments. Sheets of paper were place in a combustion chamber and lit by an electric wire. The propagating front of the fire was recorded by three CCD cameras. Each pixel recorded by the camera was smaller than the individual fibres in the paper, which allowed […]
The method works by solidifying a resin that hardens when exposed to light. The resin is solidified into a three-dimensional grid by placing it in the interference pattern set up by four intersecting laser beams. The pores in the resin are then filled with titanium dioxide, which is allowed to set. The resin is then […]
While theorists have been battling to understand high-temperature superconductivity, industry is developing devices ready for a global marketplace potentially worth billions of dollars
Read article: Industry warms to superconductors
The Millennium Dome in London – a £758m high-tech visitor attraction that was built largely with government money – is a national laughing stock in the UK. But at least the Dome opened on time. If only the same could be said for DIAMOND, a third-generation synchrotron radiation source that will be used by scientists […]
Our greatest endeavour in basic science over the past century has, undoubtedly, been the study of the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces. Although the general theory of relativity was formulated more than 80 years ago, gravitational forces are only now entering the arena of basic scientific research. This is happening because the greatest synthesis of […]
Read article: Dirac, Einstein and physics
Diodati says he became intrigued by the link between music and physics after thinking about the crescendo in Rossini’s La calunnia è un venticello, an aria from the Barber of Seville. The words in the aria describe an avalanche building up momentum, which eventually reaches the point where it causes an earthquake. “I was initially […]
Using citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, Katz has found that there is in fact a power-law or “fractal” relationship between the number of citations and the number of papers. In other words, larger countries publish more papers than smaller countries and receive disproportionately larger numbers of citations. To take this […]
The MIT team injected small quantities of air into a highly viscous liquid to stimulate the formation of air bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface, da Silveira and colleagues punctured them with a needle. A high-speed camera recorded the collapse of the bubble. They discovered that the bubble bursts slowly through the hole punctured […]
