During the 1980s the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg agreed that the British workers had been discriminated against, and in 1996 the court ordered the European Commission to settle the case. The workers can now expect to receive between £70000 and £100000 each. A major reason for the settlement is the collapse of the […]
Nearly all the quantum models of the brain depend on how long the brain can keep quantum coherence. Penrose argues for example, that microtubles – small hollow cylinders that help cells keep their shape in the brain – operate like a quantum computer and can keep information stored as ‘quantum waves’ for long periods of […]
The meeting, “Preserving the Astronomical Sky,” was held in Austria a few days before UNISPACE III, a major conference sponsored by the United Nations (UN) that will look at the impact and influence of space research and industry in the 21st Century. Light pollution has become an increasing problem in recent decades, with the resolution […]
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 […]
