The meeting, attended by 200 astronomers, discussed the future of more than 40 facilities and drew up a plan to provide a basis for budget discussions with the ministry for education and research. It strongly supports France’s continued participation in the European Southern Observatory and several other international projects. However, cuts to the astronomy facilities […]
On page 98 of the April 3 issue of Science Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, report that no search engine covers more that one third of the 320 million indexable pages on the Web. The pair studied six search engines and found that HotBot covered the […]
The University and College Admissions Service says that applications for undergraduate physics courses have fallen by just 1.2%, compared with a drop of 4.2% in all subjects. It has received 17 377 applications for physics entry later this year, with each student making an average of 5.2 applications. UK physics students can either do a […]
The report, which analyses data ranging from global trends in R&D expenditure to patterns of research mobility, was published by the European Commission last month. It aims to inform and guide future policy-making. The EU’s share of global R&D expenditure was 26.9% in 1995, representing a fall of about 1% since 1980. The EU now […]
The discovery of visible light from gamma-ray bursts has revealed that these puzzling objects lie among the most distant quasars and galaxies in the universe
Read article: Gamma-ray bursts
Two of the acronyms most frequently used by physicists in the UK celebrate their fourth birthdays this month. Between them the EPSRC and PPARC fund most of the research projects performed by physicists in UK universities. The remit of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is self-explanatory, while the Engineering and Physical Sciences […]
Gregory VanWiggeren and Rajarshi Roy of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US have now used chaotic lasers to generate the complex signals of the type needed in many of today’s communications systems (G D Van Wiggeren and R Roy 1998 Science 279 1198). The chaotic laser system can be used to synchronize a […]
“What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not wait for an answer.” Francis Bacon’s well known quotation shows Pilate to be a busy and sensible administrator, who was aware of problems but who knew how to avoid unnecessary conflict most of the time. However, his washing of hands for the trial of Jesus had […]
In his article last year, the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont separated out some of the distinct strands in “science studies” and tried to provide a considered critique of sociology and history of scientific knowledge. He saw that there is a difference between “philosophical relativism” and “methodological relativism”. He grasped that the former view, which says […]
The new findings is reported by Brian Wernicke and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the current issue of Science . Since 1991 Wernicke and colleagues have been using the satellite-based Global Positioning System to measure the movement of Yucca Mountain with unprecedented precision. The team […]
