Brown joined the science committee in 1965 and became chairman in 1990, losing his position when the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995. The current chairman of the committee, James Sensenbrenner, was one of the many people to pay tribute to Brown. Others included President Clinton, vice-president Al Gore and NASA chief Dan Goldin. […]
X-ray observations with Chandra will complement infrared images from the Hubble Space Telescope and higher-energy observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will have a resolution that is 8 times better than any previous X-ray telescope, while its sensitivity will be 20 times better. It will detect X-rays from stellar flares, exploding supernovae, white […]
The RHIC seeks to recreate the primordial “soup” of particles that existed immediately after the big bang and from which everyday matter formed. Today quarks only exist inside strongly interacting particles, called hadrons, where they are held together by gluons. By colliding two beams of relativistic heavy ions – such as gold ions travelling near […]
There are already over 300 million documents on the Internet, and only 34% of them have been catalogued by the most popular search engines such as Hotbot. This has made the topology of the Internet extremely difficult to describe or measure. However, Reka Albert, Hawoong Jeong and Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame […]
Photons are traditionally detected by converting their energy into an electric signal, which destroys the photon in the process. An additional problem in quantum measurements is that if one variable – say the position – is measured accurately, then the consequent uncertainty in another, incompatible variable – the momentum in this example – will mean […]
‘t Hooft has made several crucial contributions to the Standard Model of particle physics. In 1967 Salam and Weinberg showed how to unify the weak and electromagnetic interactions – two of the four fundamental forces of nature – into a single electroweak force. In 1971 ‘t Hooft showed that the electroweak force was renormalizable – […]
Until the Dubna experiments all artificial superheavy nuclei had half-lives that were measured in milliseconds. However, the most stable nuclei on the island of stability are predicted to have half-lives of years. The first isotope of element 114 to be discovered – the one with 175 neutrons – has a half-life of 30 seconds, while […]
“Most people in the UK receive their science education through science fiction so it makes sense to study the link between science fiction and science fact,” says Brake. The three year degree course will be split into thirty modules, over half of which will be based on astronomy and space science. There will be seven […]
Scheuer and Orenstein used so-called vertical cavity surface-emitting lasers. In these devices the light is emitted from the top of the active region of the laser, rather than from the edge as in conventional semiconductor lasers. This gives a two-dimensional output in which the patterns can form, rather than the one-dimensional output from conventional devices. […]
