Japan thinks big on synchrotrons
The highest energy synchrotron radiation source in the world has officially opened
Author archive
JET sets fusion record
Fusion experiments at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion project in Oxfordshire, UK, are more than halfway to breakeven – the point where the power produced by the reactor equals that supplied to it. But a decision on whether the experiments should continue after 1999 has yet to be taken. For the last six weeks, […]
Students suffer with old equipment
Mercury manometers, out-of-date computers and pressure gauges calibrated in pounds per square inch. These are some of the pieces of obsolete equipment that UK students are using in undergraduate laboratories, according to a report published at the end of September. The financial pressures of recent years mean that universities and colleges in England and Wales […]
Euro defence giant born
Alcatel Alsthom and Dassault have become strategic partners in Thomson CSF
Funding rises in France
Spending on research will rise next year, but major changes are afoot
Empire strikes back
The US Army Space and Strategic Defense Command has fired its Miracl laser at an American satellite orbiting 260 miles above the Earth. The powerful laser, an offshoot of the Strategic Defence Initiative of the 1980s, was fired twice from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The laser beam destroyed neither its target […]
Funding cuts dismay physicists
Physicists in the UK reacted with anger last month when they heard that two of their most important sources of funding would be cut
Laser-cooled Nobel prize
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Steve Chu, and Bill Phillips have won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics
US calls for extra synchrotron funds
A review panel in the US has called for extra funding for synchrotron radiation sources
Fusion energy: the agony, the ecstasy and alternatives
Fusion – the release of nuclear binding energy from light nuclei and its practical exploitation – has been a major world research discipline for the past four decades. It promises to be an energy resource capable of indefinitely sustaining humanity under all conceivable scenarios of population growth and energy demand. In fact, fusion is the […]
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