Luckily, SOHO drifted back into sunlight long enough to recharge its solar cells for communications with Earth, and in the past month the fuel has been heated from -100 C to 10 C. Engineers had to be careful not to rupture the tanks while heating the fuel. The tanks have survived so far and the […]
Many of the optical and magnetic techniques used to trap and cool atoms do not work with molecules because they have complex internal energy levels. Instead Doyle and his colleagues chilled the molecules by cooling the walls of a container filled with a mixture of helium atoms and calcium monohydride molecules. The molecules were cooled […]
There is currently a considerable resurgence of interest in the debate between science and religion. This is evident in the writings of both “creation scientists” and “new age” enthusiasts. But despite their substantial public following, neither group is part of the serious academic debate, because they do not give sufficiently earnest attention to scientific issues. […]
Yet technology is now associated with unemployment and social distress in many countries, as the OECD notes. “However, technology per se is not the culprit, ” the report continues. “Its economy-wide employment impact is likely to be positive provided that the mechanisms for translating technology into jobs are not impaired by deficiencies in training and […]
Laser technology has come a long way since the 1960s. The very earliest lasers, such as ruby and helium-neon devices, were formidable contraptions. They relied on dilute active media with discrete energy levels such as gases or dopant ions scattered in a solid, external pumping mechanisms such as bulky coiled flashlamps or auxiliary gases excited […]
Brief History of Time : From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking The author explores the outer reaches of our knowledge of astrophysics and the nature of time and the universe, and reviews the great theories of the cosmos, from Galileo and Newton to Einstein and Poincare. BUY THE BOOK: Amazon (US) […]
The fascination of physics, for me, lies in its supremely exotic nature. Although it is a subject grounded in experimental test and rigorous verification, it nonetheless spans an awesome range of weird and wonderful concepts. The power of physics to describe the real world is persuasive, but it is its power to describe other worlds […]
Read article: Single-electron transistors
Researchers are building new transistors that actively exploit the quantum properties of electrons
Alcock and co-workers have been searching for MACHOs – massive compact halo objects – with a technique known as gravitational lensing. In this the gravitational field of a heavy object acts like a lens when it passes in front of a background star, magnifying the star’s light. Researchers have so far found 15 such events […]
Gilbert Collins and colleagues used the NOVA laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to carry out the experiments (Science 281 1178). The deuterium was placed in a small copper cell with a plunger fitted at one end. When the laser hits the plunger, it sends a shock wave through the chamber. By […]
