Experiments on the effect have been performed by introducing a compound called angiotensin II into the blood stream of a rat. This compound narrows the diameter of the blood vessels, which increases the blood pressure and leads to the formation of the “sausage-string” pattern in the blood vessels. If the angiotensin II is removed, the […]
There are a number of reasons why GRB980425 is associated with SN1998bw. Both occurred at the same time, at the same location and in the same direction as each other. SN1998bw is also a rare Type Ib/c supernova instead of the more common Type I or Type II explosions. Furthermore, material from the supernova was […]
Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional quantum Hall effect – in 1982. Robert B. Laughlin at Stanford University, California, explained their results one year later. The Hall effect was discovered in 1879. This […]
Understanding how molecules behave on the quantum level can help develop new drugs or improve the synthesis of chemical products. However, the underlying mathematics behind quantum chemistry are exceedingly complex. Density-functional theory simplifies the mathematics surrounding the behaviour of electrons in a molecule. Instead of having to calculate the position and motion of every electron […]
In the deal NASA gains Russia’s research time during the first four to five years of the space station’s construction, the rights to store experiments onboard a Russian-built module and the help of Russian cosmonauts with any experiments. The deal is worth potentially an additional 5000 hours of cosmonaut time to US researchers. The US […]
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by extra variables such as the biosphere, geological activity and large quantities of water on the surface, which can make it difficult to study some […]
The DFG has been experimenting with different ways of digitizing postgraduate dissertations for some time. These documents are usually one of the hardest sets of scientific information to access because copies are held only at national libraries or at the awarding institution, and students tend to only publish 3 or 4 copies. This new program […]
The technique is based on characteristics of individual photons that are generated randomly between the sender and the receiver. Although researchers have already transmitted quantum encryption keys through optical fibres, atmospheric turbulence had disrupted similar attempts in the open air. William Buttler and colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US succeeded by carrying […]
Quasar jets are streams of plasma that travel at near the speed of light from supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies. The jets appear at radio wavelengths, but can also be detected in the optical, X-ray and gamma-ray regions of the spectrum. The difficulty for astronomers has been distinguishing between electrons and positrons […]
However,it is the last paragraph that makes the paper unique: “The tragedy of beautiful theories, ” write Chakraverty et al., “is that they are often destroyed by ugly facts. One perhaps can add that the comedy of not so beautiful theories is that they cannot even be destroyed; like figures in a cartoon they continue […]
