Little ventured for physics
Physics-based companies in the UK can find it difficult to raise venture capital. Michael Kenward finds out why
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Read article: The physics of El Niño
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?
New money, new physics
The government plans to invest an extra £400m in new projects through the research councils, £300m in universities through a new Infrastructure Fund and another £300m for research in universities through the regional funding councils. The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, is contributing £300m to the Infrastructure Fund and a further £100m towards the […]
American hesitation puts ITER in limbo
The Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees fusion research in the US, wanted to sign the extension. However, the Republican-controlled Congress insisted that the US should not sign it without “Congressional concurrence”. Key members of Congress had such strong doubts about ITER that they withheld their concurrence up to and beyond the deadline. That struggle […]
New clues to the left-handed origins of life
Fred Hoyle was the first to suggest that organic molecules developed in outer space and then fell to the earth, but it was not until the discovery of large quantities of left-handed amino acids in a meteorite last year that biologists seriously started to think about an extraterrestrial origin for the left-handedness of amino acids. […]
PEP-II shapes up
PEP-II consists of two independent storage rings in the tunnel that housed the original PEP collider. The high-energy ring, which stores a 9 GeV electron beam, is an upgrade of the existing PEP collider, while the low-energy ring, in which the 3.1 GeV positrons are stored, is completely new. Matter and anti-matter are thought to […]
Radar finds SOHO
Attempts to locate the satellite with NASA’s Deep Space Network had been unsuccessful. However, by bouncing radio waves from the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico off the satellite, and detecting the reflections on a 70 meter radio telescope in Goldstone, California, astronomers have been able to establish SOHO’s position. The signals indicate that the craft […]
Solving the plutonium problem
Russia and the US each have 50 tons of weapons-grade plutonium to dispose of by either converting it into fuel, or mixing it in with radioactive waste. At the same time, France and the UK separate 20 tons of plutonium a year from spent civilian nuclear fuel but burn only 9 tons a year as […]
Strain doubles superconductor temperatures
Their technique works by growing single crystal films of the superconducting compound lanthanum-strontium-copper-oxide (La1.9Sr0.1CuO4) on top of a crystal with a smaller lattice spacing. Because the layers are very thin, the layer of superconductor is placed under ‘epitaxial’ strain. The compression in a single plane produces much greater improvements in Tc than standard ways of […]
UK ends ‘free’ Internet access
The charges are designed to help fund the soaring costs of international Internet access from the UK. Over the past four years access costs have risen from £1 million ($1.7 m) to £7 million ($11.1 m). However, the speed at which UKERNA has introduced charging has caught many departments by surprise. UKERNA calls the new […]
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