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, […]
Financial institutions already employ physicists because they are uniquely familiar with the mathematical and conceptual thinking needed to understand financial risk in, for example, currencies and property. Previously these physicists have had to learn about finance on the job. Andrew Hirsch, head of the physics department at Purdue, hopes that the new course will change […]
Planets are thought to form from the debris surrounding young stars. As material rotates around the star, gravitational attraction causes the debris to clump together into planets. Gradually the planets sweep up the debris and dust in their orbit, decreasing the amount of material in the star’s rotational axis. For example, if our solar system […]
Search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista record a list of pages with keywords in them, but cannot interpret how relevant the information is on the page. For example the word ‘quantum’ returns 778, 930 references through AltaVista, but doesn’t state how many are physics related. Kleinberg’s program analyzes the links between Web sites by […]
The meeting was due to be held in Belgium at the end of June. However, Yvan Ylieff, Belgium’s minister for scientific policy and organizer of the meeting, has announced that disagreements over the future direction of the agency, and the forthcoming national elections in Germany, have caused the meeting to be abandoned. The election is […]
Three companies are investing in the project. Qwest Communications, one of the world’s fastest growing telecommunications companies, is donating 16000 miles of fibre optic cabling to the project, while Cisco Systems and Nortel have offered equipment ‘in kind’. All three companies see Internet-2 as an ideal test bed for the next generation of high-speed switching […]
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