Each plane has a 3m wingspan and weighs 13.1 kg. During normal operations the craft will measure temperature, humidity and pressure over the ocean. At a cost of just $25000 each, the planes could dramatically cut the costs of gathering such information. Meanwhile, during a test flight in Hawaii, NASA’s Pathfinder-Plus – a remote controlled […]
The citation highlights Adler’s derivation of a sum rule for pion-nucleon scattering that marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the currents and broken symmetries of the strong interaction. One of Jackiw’s major contributions was his discovery (with Rebbi) of fractional charge and spin when field theories are applied to condensed matter physics. The paths […]
Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Piers Bizony and Jamie Doran Bloomsbury p256 £12.59 On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and venture into space. This biography is based on material from sensitive KGB files and restricted documents from the Russian space […]
The interferometer was built by Mark Kasevich and colleagues at Yale University in the US and used individual atoms, rather than macroscopic man-made objects, to measure the gradient. By observing the phase and frequency shifts of laser light passed through two cooled ensembles of atoms, they believe that the interferometer has the potential to be […]
Arima has long been a keen advocate for reforming Japanese science. Previously he helped shape the 1996 Basic Law for Science and Technology, which aimed to increase Japan’s spending on science. He also proposed educational and administrative reforms during the last government. Monbusho has an annual budget of 5819 billion yen (£24.6 billion) and accounts […]
Zeilinger had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory following a meeting at Dharamsala in Northern India last October at which he and four other physicists had, over the course of five days, discussed physics and cosmology with the Buddhist leader. In Dharamsala, Zeilinger had demonstrated some basic quantum phenomena – such as wave-particle duality […]
Previous attempts to use DNA as a molecular building block failed because its double helix structure is so flexible. However, Seeman and colleagues realized that if two synthetic DNA chains were placed side-by-side and linked at two cross over junctions, they would form a very rigid structure – called a DX molecular unit – that […]
Physics, chemistry and physical chemistry have undergone tremendous changes over the course of this century. In physics, the focus has shifted from atoms to subatomic particles, namely nuclear physics and particle physics. Meanwhile, the physics of collections of atoms in the liquid and solid states have slowly emerged as separate, independent fields. After the Second […]
Fears over climate change and the increasing problem of pollution have put public concerns about the environment at an all-time high. Governments have responded to public pressure by introducing legislation to reduce pollution, and at the Kyoto summit last year they agreed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by an average of 5.2%. Europe has […]
Read article: The physics of El Niño
Every few years the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean warms up around the equator and plays havoc with the climate on several continents. Why does this happen?
