DERA has an annual turnover of £1bn, 90% of which comes from the Ministry of Defence, and is active in many areas of physics including semiconductors, materials and optics. The agency would encourage the exploitation of defence technology by industry, and the transfer of civilian technology into military programmes. For example, in the 1960s researchers […]
In Ammann’s scheme the plants are grown in a vertical structure with their roots protruding into a central column. A nozzle at the top of the structure sprays nutrients into this column, wetting the roots of the plants. The plants are also able to breathe in nitrogen and carbon dioxide through their roots, as would […]
Interference from satellites is an increasing problem for radio astronomers, and this problem is set to get worse as hundreds of telecommunications satellites are launched into low-Earth orbit over the next few years. Signals from the satellites – mostly for mobile phones – interfere with the radio signals from outer space that the astronomers are […]
The government is to contribute £20 million to a University Challenge Fund to help universities to exploit academic research. The Welcome Trust and the Gatsby Trust have contributed a further £20 million to the scheme, and the government hopes to raise another £10 million from other sources. Brown also announced an extra £250 million for […]
Although ESA has undergone a cost cutting exercise over the past two years, it is still looking for new sources of revenue. Rodota hopes to open up additional sources of finance by increasing the number of commercial programmes at the agency. He has targeted three areas in particular: telecommunications, multimedia and Earth observation. Battle also […]
The UK government is committed to basic science, said Battle. “The ongoing comprehensive spending review gives us the opportunity to spell out our commitment to the science base, ” he added. Battle called on physicists to keep drawing a parallel between the UK and the US, where the budget request for 1999 is up 8% […]
The device works by storing the data as regions of electric charge. The charge is trapped within a thin dielectric layer coated onto a conducting platter. The hard drive reads and writes data using field tip-emitters fabricated on the top of a silicon chip. The tip of each emitter is only 25 nanometres across, which […]
The observatory employs 115 staff to provide technical support for the UK’s overseas telescopes. Some of these staff will transfer to the new Astronomical Technology Centre, which is part of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Others will take up positions at the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moore’s University. Some staff will be made redundant. […]
The French space agency CNES is hoping to follow in the footsteps of NASA’s Discovery mission programme by using smaller, cheaper spacecraft instead of larger, more expensive missions. SPOT Image, the company set up by the CNES to market satellite imagery, has been a disaster from a financial viewpoint. Although it was set up in […]
Richard Preston is best known for his best-seller on the Ebola virus: The Hot Zone. Before that, he had written a book about a group of astronomers working at the Palomar Observatory in California. This book has now been reissued in paperback in the UK. First Light is unusual for a book about physics in […]
