Yet technology is now associated with unemployment and social distress in many countries, as the OECD notes. “However, technology per se is not the culprit, ” the report continues. “Its economy-wide employment impact is likely to be positive provided that the mechanisms for translating technology into jobs are not impaired by deficiencies in training and […]
Brief History of Time : From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking The author explores the outer reaches of our knowledge of astrophysics and the nature of time and the universe, and reviews the great theories of the cosmos, from Galileo and Newton to Einstein and Poincare. BUY THE BOOK: Amazon (US) […]
Researchers are building new transistors that actively exploit the quantum properties of electrons
Read article: Single-electron transistors
Laser technology has come a long way since the 1960s. The very earliest lasers, such as ruby and helium-neon devices, were formidable contraptions. They relied on dilute active media with discrete energy levels such as gases or dopant ions scattered in a solid, external pumping mechanisms such as bulky coiled flashlamps or auxiliary gases excited […]
The fascination of physics, for me, lies in its supremely exotic nature. Although it is a subject grounded in experimental test and rigorous verification, it nonetheless spans an awesome range of weird and wonderful concepts. The power of physics to describe the real world is persuasive, but it is its power to describe other worlds […]
Alcock and co-workers have been searching for MACHOs – massive compact halo objects – with a technique known as gravitational lensing. In this the gravitational field of a heavy object acts like a lens when it passes in front of a background star, magnifying the star’s light. Researchers have so far found 15 such events […]
Gilbert Collins and colleagues used the NOVA laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to carry out the experiments (Science 281 1178). The deuterium was placed in a small copper cell with a plunger fitted at one end. When the laser hits the plunger, it sends a shock wave through the chamber. By […]
Previously satellite measurements have suggested that the atmosphere was cooling at 0.05 Kelvin per decade, while ground-based instruments showed an increase of 0.13 Kelvin per decade. However, as polar satellites orbit the Earth, they suffer atmospheric drag. The thickness and height of the Earth’s atmosphere is dependent on the sun’s solar activity. When solar activity […]
Most automobile vibration testing is sinusoidal in nature, in which a regular pattern of rapid, slow and zero vibrations vary in a predictable pattern to mimic driving conditions. Hu’s random vibration testing is more realistic. It uses several random processes to mimic different driving routes and styles – and hence mimic the stresses on the […]
“This is the best news I’ve heard since we lost contact with SOHO” says Roger Bonnet, ESA’s director of science. “We should just hope that the damage sustained by SOHO’s enforced period of deep freeze does not affect the scientific payload too much.” SOHO is a $1 billion joint venture between the European Space Agency […]
