The 50 second burst, known as GRB971214, was detected by the two satellites. The Italian/Dutch BeppoSAX satellite gave the precise position of the blast, while NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory measured its brightness. Further observations at different wavelengths by a collection of ground and space-based telescopes measured the distance to the optical counterpart of the […]
In the last several years, my team at the University of Utah has developed a new seeding technique that can clear supercooled cloud and fog on a scale several times larger than a commercial airport. The method, which can be applied from a vehicle on the ground, has been used to clear airports, cities and […]
The middle of Antarctica is an ideal place to look for ‘survivors’ of the burn-up because material in the region suffer little, if any, chemical or physical weathering and there is very little contamination. The snow and ice also increase the chances of finding extraterrestrial material. Taylor and colleagues realized that micrometeorites would concentrate at […]
One side effect of the increasing emphasis on maximizing the economic return on public investments in science and technology has been the growth of “foresight exercises” around the world. Pioneered by the Japanese government in the early 1970s, foresight has mushroomed in the 1990s. The basic idea is to identify the likely social, economic and […]
The sum is substantial – domestic spending on basic research is about IR£2m each year; the country also receives IR£20m from the EU. “If the money is not released very soon, there will be one very significant row, ” says Vincent McBrierty, a polymer physicist at Trinity College Dublin. The Office of Science and Technology […]
The Foresight programme was launched in 1994 to improve wealth creation and the quality of life in the UK. It has been led by 16 panels of business executives, scientists and government officials, who have tried to identify and respond to future market trends and technological opportunities. The panels cover most sectors of the economy, […]
Superconductors lose their unique properties above a critical current density of about 105 A cm-2. The best candidates for high-current applications – silver sheathed tapes of the bismuth-lead-strontium-calcium-copper-oxygen alloy known as BSCCO – reach about 25% of this value. To explore the factors limiting current performance, the researchers analyzed some of the best multi-filament tapes […]
Physicists, more than most people, are accustomed to dealing with gases. Yet even physicists often treat gases as something to be taken for granted, a sort of Platonic ideal with interesting or useful properties but with little connection to the world outside the laboratory. Whether as natural resources or something to be delivered in cylinders, […]
Developments in X-ray crystallography and progress in the production of good-quality protein crystals are leading to important advances in our knowledge of protein structure and function
Read article: Protein crystallography: the human genome in 3-D
Neutrinos travel at the speed of light and only interact very weakly with matter, which makes them very difficult to detect. This is why neutrino detectors need to be large and built underground – otherwise cosmic ray interactions will mimic the neutrino signal. When a neutrino does interact with the heavy water in the tank, […]
