The department has close links with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, also in California, which Teller played a key role in establishing in the early 1950s. The applied science department at Davis was created when Teller realized that Livermore scientists had no experience of translating basic research to practical applications. Although Teller, who turned 91 […]
Space agencies have become increasingly concerned about space debris after both the Russian Mir Space Station and the US Space Shuttle were damaged by flecks of paint travelling at over 13 kilometres per second. And last year a French spy satellite became the first satellite to be completely knocked out of operation by space debris. […]
The report also highlights the fact that 27% of the members of the panels that advise the EU on research are women. It does not, however, mention last year’s report on mismanagement and fraud in the EU’s research programmes. The report was highly critical of Edith Cresson, the commissioner for research, and led to the […]
“The meeting was extraordinarily successful in helping to bring people together,” says Siegbert Rather, director for physical sciences at the United Nations Educa-tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which organized the event. “There was a resounding ‘yes’ to take the project forward.” Some 70 participants attended the meeting, including delegates representing governments from the Middle […]
Charge-parity (CP) symmetry implies that particles and antiparticles behave like mirror images of each other. Charge conjugation changes particles into their antiparticles – e.g., electrons become positrons and so on – while parity-reversal is a special type of reflection in which all three directions of space are reversed. In 1964 Andrei Sakharov showed that CP […]
Researchers have been worried about the discrepancy between the experimental data and simulations at Super-Kamiokande for some time. According to the simulations, the experiment was detecting too few muon neutrino events or too many electron neutrinos. Boezio and others decided to tackle the discrepancy by making measurements in the atmosphere. Atmospheric neutrinos are created by […]
Fukumura and colleagues used a scanning Hall probe microscope to study the formation of the bubbles. The compound that they studied is unusual in that its magnetic structure changes markedly with temperature. As the temperature drops, the material becomes more antiferromagnetic (that is, the magnetic moments of neighbouring layers point in opposite directions). This effect […]
Gemini-North is situated on top of Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano some 4200 meters above sea level. Mauna Kea is a popular location for telescopes because of its high altitude and clear skies. The 8-meter Gemini telescopes are the latest in a new generation of large telescopes that already includes the two 10-metre Keck telescopes […]
Read article: Gemini telescope passes first hurdle
The Earth’s average global temperature has increased by 0.6 Kelvin in the past 100 years. There are believed to be four main processes that can effect the Earth’s climate. Two of these, small aerosol particles from volcanic eruptions and changes in solar luminosity, occur naturally. The other two, sulphate aerosols and greenhouse gases such as […]
The photonic crystal was made by using an ion beam to drill a 2D hexagonal array of holes in a layer of indium gallium arsenide phosphide (InGaAsP). The regular spacing of the holes means that only certain wavelengths of light can propagate in the crystal. The holes were 515 nm apart and had a radius […]
