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Wanted: a bible for science
Future archaeologists who come across books from our era would, he says, find it difficult to tell the difference between ‘new age’ science books full of “junk science” or those containing scientific fact. This is why Lovelock believes that a well-written record of scientific knowledge designed for an intelligent reader is needed. The book should […]
Sampling micrometeorites at the South Pole
The middle of Antarctica is an ideal place to look for ‘survivors’ of the burn-up because material in the region suffer little, if any, chemical or physical weathering and there is very little contamination. The snow and ice also increase the chances of finding extraterrestrial material. Taylor and colleagues realized that micrometeorites would concentrate at […]
Sudbury Neutrino Observatory opens
Neutrinos travel at the speed of light and only interact very weakly with matter, which makes them very difficult to detect. This is why neutrino detectors need to be large and built underground – otherwise cosmic ray interactions will mimic the neutrino signal. When a neutrino does interact with the heavy water in the tank, […]
Tackling current limits in superconductors
Superconductors lose their unique properties above a critical current density of about 105 A cm-2. The best candidates for high-current applications – silver sheathed tapes of the bismuth-lead-strontium-calcium-copper-oxygen alloy known as BSCCO – reach about 25% of this value. To explore the factors limiting current performance, the researchers analyzed some of the best multi-filament tapes […]
Bureaucracy blocks R&D
The sum is substantial – domestic spending on basic research is about IR£2m each year; the country also receives IR£20m from the EU. “If the money is not released very soon, there will be one very significant row, ” says Vincent McBrierty, a polymer physicist at Trinity College Dublin. The Office of Science and Technology […]
New look for Foresight
The Foresight programme was launched in 1994 to improve wealth creation and the quality of life in the UK. It has been led by 16 panels of business executives, scientists and government officials, who have tried to identify and respond to future market trends and technological opportunities. The panels cover most sectors of the economy, […]
Cloud seeding clears the air
In the last several years, my team at the University of Utah has developed a new seeding technique that can clear supercooled cloud and fog on a scale several times larger than a commercial airport. The method, which can be applied from a vehicle on the ground, has been used to clear airports, cities and […]
Living with foresight
One side effect of the increasing emphasis on maximizing the economic return on public investments in science and technology has been the growth of “foresight exercises” around the world. Pioneered by the Japanese government in the early 1970s, foresight has mushroomed in the 1990s. The basic idea is to identify the likely social, economic and […]
Read article: Protein crystallography: the human genome in 3-D
Protein crystallography: the human genome in 3-D
Developments in X-ray crystallography and progress in the production of good-quality protein crystals are leading to important advances in our knowledge of protein structure and function
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