Previously satellite measurements have suggested that the atmosphere was cooling at 0.05 Kelvin per decade, while ground-based instruments showed an increase of 0.13 Kelvin per decade. However, as polar satellites orbit the Earth, they suffer atmospheric drag. The thickness and height of the Earth’s atmosphere is dependent on the sun’s solar activity. When solar activity […]
The technique uses an iron-silica catalyst created by coating a quartz plate with an iron-silica solution. Once the solution dries it cracks into a film 30-50 microns thick. After the substrate is heated in a vacuum and then in a hydrogen-nitrogen atmosphere to make sure that it becomes chemically unreactive, the film breaks into large […]
Most automobile vibration testing is sinusoidal in nature, in which a regular pattern of rapid, slow and zero vibrations vary in a predictable pattern to mimic driving conditions. Hu’s random vibration testing is more realistic. It uses several random processes to mimic different driving routes and styles – and hence mimic the stresses on the […]
“This is the best news I’ve heard since we lost contact with SOHO” says Roger Bonnet, ESA’s director of science. “We should just hope that the damage sustained by SOHO’s enforced period of deep freeze does not affect the scientific payload too much.” SOHO is a $1 billion joint venture between the European Space Agency […]
Each plane has a 3m wingspan and weighs 13.1 kg. During normal operations the craft will measure temperature, humidity and pressure over the ocean. At a cost of just $25000 each, the planes could dramatically cut the costs of gathering such information. Meanwhile, during a test flight in Hawaii, NASA’s Pathfinder-Plus – a remote controlled […]
The citation highlights Adler’s derivation of a sum rule for pion-nucleon scattering that marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the currents and broken symmetries of the strong interaction. One of Jackiw’s major contributions was his discovery (with Rebbi) of fractional charge and spin when field theories are applied to condensed matter physics. The paths […]
Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Piers Bizony and Jamie Doran Bloomsbury p256 £12.59 On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and venture into space. This biography is based on material from sensitive KGB files and restricted documents from the Russian space […]
The interferometer was built by Mark Kasevich and colleagues at Yale University in the US and used individual atoms, rather than macroscopic man-made objects, to measure the gradient. By observing the phase and frequency shifts of laser light passed through two cooled ensembles of atoms, they believe that the interferometer has the potential to be […]
Arima has long been a keen advocate for reforming Japanese science. Previously he helped shape the 1996 Basic Law for Science and Technology, which aimed to increase Japan’s spending on science. He also proposed educational and administrative reforms during the last government. Monbusho has an annual budget of 5819 billion yen (£24.6 billion) and accounts […]
Zeilinger had invited the Dalai Lama to his laboratory following a meeting at Dharamsala in Northern India last October at which he and four other physicists had, over the course of five days, discussed physics and cosmology with the Buddhist leader. In Dharamsala, Zeilinger had demonstrated some basic quantum phenomena – such as wave-particle duality […]
