The brilliant colours in a butterfly’s wings, for example, are not produced by pigments alone. Instead a diffraction grating – a series of microscopic grooves on the surface of the wing – creates the vivid colours. Michael Gale of CSEM Zurich, Switzerland, is investigating how to produce similar structures on credit cards and bank notes […]
Greaves and colleagues used the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look at the dust around Epsilon Eridani. SCUBA operates at submillimetre wavelengths, where the glare from the central star is weak. The same instrument detected dust around three nearby stars in April. “If an astronomer could have measured what […]
Deborah Chung and Shoukai Wang of the University of Buffalo in the US stumbled across this unexpected behaviour whilst researching ‘smart’ materials. These materials, usually based on carbon fibre, use the electrical resistance of the fibres to monitor the properties of structures such as bridges and buildings. Chung has been careful not to call the […]
The Ministry of Defence funds two research organizations: the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) and the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). The review calls on DERA, which carries out non-nuclear R&D for the military, to increase its links with the commercial sector. The role of AWE, which supports Britain’s nuclear capability, will be examined in […]
Scheer and colleagues used a scanning tunnelling microscope, a mechanically controlled break junction, and lithography to fabricate various simple electronic circuits. These devices measured the effect of passing a current through a single atom as they stretched the circuit to breaking point. They discovered that the current between the metal banks across the atom is […]
The device works by utilizing a small hydraulic ram attached on the back of a truck. When the vehicle is parked in the sample area, the ram fires a metal rod 30 m into the soil. At the top of the rod, two pulse delay lasers – one operating in the infrared, the other near […]
The move came about because the French government is frustrated at the slow pace of schemes run by the European Union, such as SOCRATES and the European credit transfer system. Allègre believes that previous attempts to harmonize education systems have not progressed much because they were too rigid. French universities are very much in favour […]
Irish scientists have been worried for some time about an apparent lack of direction in the government’s research policy, especially because of a fiasco with this year’s budget which resulted in money earmarked for research not being distributed. Treacy is now trying to address these concerns through the working group. “I am conscious that there […]
The Cambridge team studied two heavy fermion compounds: CeIn3 and CePd2Si2. Heavy fermion compounds are materials in which the conduction electrons acquire masses hundreds of times those of free electrons as a result of interactions with magnetic moments within the material. The compounds exhibit many unusual properties, including superconductivity. Under most circumstances phonons are responsible […]
What are the limits of science? Will the pursuit of knowledge lead to a never-ending source of intellectual (and perhaps even monetary) riches? Or are scientists misleading the public on this score, in an attempt to gain even greater support, power and influence? It seems that we physicists are more and more frequently being forced […]
