There is no doubt that the world has an increasingly intense love-hate relationship with science. Physics certainly does not escape this deep ambivalence, and we naturally wonder if there is anything that might make “them” love us a little more and hate us a little less? This question can be formulated seriously, and will be […]
Recent advances in lasers, optics and information technology will make biomedical imaging faster and cheaper, and will also reduce the need for surgery
Read article: Biomedical optics
French cafés have long been a meeting point for intellectuals. In the 18th century Victor Hugo met fellow revolutionaries at the Procope in Paris, and in the 1950s groups of existentialists, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, gathered in the Parisian cafés Flore and Les Deux Magots. Today, the French are discovering what physicists have […]
The report has already led to security being tightened at all laboratories run the Department of Energy, including those at Los Alamos and Livermore. Fears over the new security regime – visitors from “sensitive” countries such as India, China and Russia now require special permission from Bill Richardson, head of the DOE, to attend the […]
Helbing and co-workers have identified six different traffic phases: homogeneous congestion, oscillatory congestion, triggered stop-and-go traffic, moving localised clusters, pinned localised clusters, and free traffic. One axis of their phase diagram represents the flow of vehicles already on the motorway, while the other represents vehicles joining the motorway. Transitions between the states are triggered by […]
The Hubble team, led by Wendy Freedman of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has spent the last eight years using the telescope to make more accurate measurements of the Hubble constant – the rate at which the universes expands. The team’s final result this is that the Hubble constant is 70 kilometres […]
In 1980 Klaus von Klitzing discovered that the so-called Hall conductance across a material varied in steps, not continuously, as the magnetic field was changed. In other words the Hall effect was quantized. The size of the steps was related to the charge of the electron. In 1982 Störmer and Tsui discovered the fractional quantum […]
The new technique works because the salt water conducts electricity. As the voltage on the tape changes, electrical charge carriers are injected into the nanotubes. These form electrolyte ions near the surface of the tape. On the cathode side of the tape, electrons are attracted to the nanotubes and cause them to expand. On the […]
Aldermaston has over 4000 employees and a budget of £300m. Over half of this (£168m) is spent on the manufacture, maintenance and testing of nuclear weapons, and on related research. Another £91m is spent on the Trident nuclear weapons programme and £11m goes on dismantling nuclear weapons. According to the report, a shift in emphasis […]
Snow avalanches occur when the mass of the snow overcomes the frictional resistance of the slope. This usually takes place when snow layers near the slope are loosened by spring rains or vibrations. Daerr and Douady coated an inclined felt surface with layers of the beads, making sure that the beads remained static on the […]
