Wil van Breugel from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands found their galactic nucleus by looking for radio sources that generate strong radio waves over a narrow band from a single power source. They looked for optical candidates of these sources at near […]
The ESA Council meeting, held in Brussels over the past two days, also formalised closer ties to the European Union. ESA hopes that the EU will become a major new source of funds for some of the industrial programmes such as Galileo, a joint ESA/EU global navigation system. A final decision on the future of […]
Astronomers have known about an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for nearly 200 years but it has only been in the past ten years that two other belts have been discovered. The Kuiper belt, a group of comets and asteroids beyond Neptune, was discovered through observations, while the region of asteroids between Neptune and […]
Polymers are long chain-like molecules made up of smaller molecules called monomers. It is well known that polymer chains often tie themselves in knots, but it was not clear how this influenced the mechanical properties of the polymer. Klein and colleagues modelled what happens when a knotted polymer chain consisting of 144 carbon atoms was […]
Almost everyone has heard of the “Oppenheimer affair”. It took place between 1953-54 when the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, was subjected to a humiliating show trial by the Atomic Energy Commission and subsequently permanently stripped of his security clearance. But most people, including most historians of science, know little else about the […]
Read article: Atomic secrets and the red scare
Geophysicists realised that the Earth’s crust consisted of a series of tectonic plates when they noticed that as magma flowed out of the ocean ridges and cooled, iron in the magma magnetized in the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. This field changes direction roughly every 10000 years. The material from the ocean ridge gradually […]
Under the terms of the new European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA), JET would no longer carry out one common programme of work approved by the EU. Instead, the JET facilities would be run by the UKAEA on behalf of Euratom. Visiting teams of researchers from JET’s 16 member states or “associations”, which include the UK, […]
Galaxies have been forming since the universe was less than 10% of its current age – as supercomputer simulations predict and observations have confirmed
Read article: How are galaxies made?
Will the patents taken out on quantum computers expire before such computers are ever built?
Physicists are rightly proud of the way that basic research in the past has paid off in terms of technology that is widely used everyday. We all know the examples: transistors, lasers, optical fibres, magnetic resonance scanners and so on. These inventions have all made lots of money for individuals and companies somewhere in the […]
