Neptune’s ring arcs were first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1984. In the absence of some external source of stability the rings would have been expected to decay within a matter of months. But the three rings – called Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité – are still visible, and it has been assumed that their […]
An earlier report from the National Research Council has already expressed concern that the US may not retain its leadership in science and technology. The report speculated that the supply of foreign researchers moving to the US could dry up as the world’s economy improves. The report concluded that more US students had to be […]
Photons from the laser can excite electrons in the water molecules into a so-called anti-bonding state. Molecules in this state can adopt one of two distorted shapes, both of which can dissociate into a hydroxide radical and a hydrogen atom. However the two different shapes can result in the hydroxide radical being created in different […]
Read article: A double-slit experiment in a single molecule
Supersymmetry is an attractive theory to physicists as it provides a connection between all known elementary particles and can simplify many complex interactions. High energy supersymmetry suggests that instead of two types of basic elementary particles – bosons and fermions – there is just one. It also implies that high-energy physics experiments should detect twice […]
Parisi won the award for his work in a wide number of fields. The official citation highlights “his study of scaling violations in deep inelastic processes (Altarelli-Parisi equations), a model that links supersymmetry and superconductors together, the introduction of multifractals equations into turbulence studies, the stochastic differential equation for growth models for random aggregation (the […]
At the age of two, John Desmond Bernal was taken by his American mother from their farm in Ireland to see his grandmother in California. He amazed other passengers on the steamship by talking in both English and French. Later on, when he was at Cambridge, his fellow undergraduates would nickname him “Sage” because of […]
The Senate has become increasingly vocal about alleged Chinese spying at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (see PhysicsWeb 28 May) and has argued for increased security at the nuclear weapons labs. Bethe – who was also in charge of the Manhattan bomb-project’s theoretical physics division – and the other authors of the letter point out […]
The European satellite organisation Eumetsat will update pictures every 10 minutes of the Moon’s shadow as it rushes across the globe. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has brought together a wide range of material – including some of the experiments scientists hope to carry out – on their own web site ESA Eclipse99. Although the […]
The UK synchrotron, once known as Diamond, is intended to replace the ageing second-generation SRS machine at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, although the location of the new machine has still to be decided. The Wellcome Trust is contributing £110m to the construction costs. Biologists are likely to be the main users of the machine, […]
Banin and co-workers used quantum dots made of indium arsenide, covered with a nonconducting barrier of hexane dithiol molecules and linked to a conducting gold film. The radius of the nearly spherical indium arsenide nanocrystals varied between 10 and 40 nm. Electrons tunnel from the gold through the insulating layer to the nanocrystal. The number […]
