The European Science Foundation is an association of 62 major national funding agencies devoted to scientific research in 21 countries. The ESF assists its member organizations in two main ways: by bringing scientists together in its scientific programmes; and through the joint study of issues of strategic importance in European science policy. The plan splits […]
The Implications of the Dearing Report for the Structure and Funding of University Research calls for the government to immediately invest £410 – £430 million in the UK’s research infrastructure, and contains some 37 recommendation and conclusions on the Dearing report. The committee’s main concern is the effect that the Dearing report will have on […]
The meeting, attended by 200 astronomers, discussed the future of more than 40 facilities and drew up a plan to provide a basis for budget discussions with the ministry for education and research. It strongly supports France’s continued participation in the European Southern Observatory and several other international projects. However, cuts to the astronomy facilities […]
The University and College Admissions Service says that applications for undergraduate physics courses have fallen by just 1.2%, compared with a drop of 4.2% in all subjects. It has received 17 377 applications for physics entry later this year, with each student making an average of 5.2 applications. UK physics students can either do a […]
The report, which analyses data ranging from global trends in R&D expenditure to patterns of research mobility, was published by the European Commission last month. It aims to inform and guide future policy-making. The EU’s share of global R&D expenditure was 26.9% in 1995, representing a fall of about 1% since 1980. The EU now […]
Officials from all three countries are concerned at the rapid spate of mergers in the US defence and aerospace industry, and hope that a European equivalent can be created to compete against the Americans. Ideally they would like such a European defence giant to be created by this time next year. The report was issued […]
On page 98 of the April 3 issue of Science Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, report that no search engine covers more that one third of the 320 million indexable pages on the Web. The pair studied six search engines and found that HotBot covered the […]
Gregory VanWiggeren and Rajarshi Roy of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US have now used chaotic lasers to generate the complex signals of the type needed in many of today’s communications systems (G D Van Wiggeren and R Roy 1998 Science 279 1198). The chaotic laser system can be used to synchronize a […]
Read article: Gamma-ray bursts
The discovery of visible light from gamma-ray bursts has revealed that these puzzling objects lie among the most distant quasars and galaxies in the universe
“What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not wait for an answer.” Francis Bacon’s well known quotation shows Pilate to be a busy and sensible administrator, who was aware of problems but who knew how to avoid unnecessary conflict most of the time. However, his washing of hands for the trial of Jesus had […]
