Teller played important roles in the development of the atomic and hydrogen bomb. In 1939 he chauffeured another Hungarian physicist, Leó Szilárd, to a meeting with Albert Einstein. Szilárd persuaded Einstein to write to President Roosevelt about the need to develop an atomic bomb. This letter led to the establishment of US atomic programme. While […]
The Chalk River lab is owned by Atomic Energy of Canada (AECL) and supplies molybdenum-99, iodine-125, iodine-131 and xenon-133 to MDS Nordion for the manufacture of radiopharmaceuticals. A derivative of molybdenum-99 – technetium 99 – is used in 90 per cent of hospital radiopharmaceutical medical procedures. This amounts to over 15 million medical procedures per […]
The deal was hatched in discussions between Ellis Rubinstein, editor of Science , and Zhou Guangzhao, president of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology. A group of Chinese funding agencies have joined forces to pay for the deal. China is seen by many publishers as an expanding market over the next few years. The […]
Secrets of success One of the reasons for this high impact is that Scandinavian physicists specialize in niche areas. According to Ole Hansen, director of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, they prefer to identify an interesting area and build up a wealth of knowledge and expertise in it. For example, he […]
The LHC will be a 14 TeV proton-proton collider. High-energy physicists will use to LHC to search for the Higgs particle (or particles), which are thought to explain the origins of mass. It will also be used to search for “supersymmetric” particles and to explore why the universe is made entirely of matter, even though […]
Coronas form when a stream of gas passes between two electrodes maintained at different voltages. The potential difference causes energetic electrons to collide with the gas, producing a glowing plasma that consists of negative ions and radicals. This is a negative discharge corona. However, if dust builds up on the equipment, a positive discharge corona […]
The event is unusual in that the star appears to have been heavy enough – possibly 100 times the mass of the Sun – to collapse back on itself and form a black hole instead of completely blowing apart. Only a few of the hundred million stars in our galaxy are this massive. Measurements made […]
The TIMSS exercise tests students at the end of secondary school education in four subjects: general science, physics, mathematics, and advanced mathematics. But according to Rotberg, only 6 of the 16 countries participating in the physics tests met the international sampling guidelines specified by TIMSS. In general science only 5 out of 21 countries complied […]
The two recent breakthroughs exploit the quantum properties of nuclear spins, which can point “up” or “down” relative to an applied electric or magnetic field. A team of physicists from IBM, Stanford University and MIT in the US used nuclear magnetic resonance to manipulate the spins of hydrogen and carbon-13 nuclei in a chloroform (CHCl3) […]
The British Gelogological Survey registered Monday’s hydrogen explosion at 4.7 on the Richter scale – similar to a light earthquake. But the failure of seismograph stations to register today’s explosions highlights some of the problems with a nuclear test ban. The CTBT says that monitoring stations only need to detect explosions from bombs averaging more […]
