Reviewed by Allan Newton This is an interesting book that analyses the career options of scientists who become consultants, whether in a self-employed capacity or in a large consultancy firm. It is a book that surely must be required reading for scientists who are considering consultancy or thinking about setting up their own small high-tech […]
Shuji Nakamura describes the advances that enabled his group to develop blue light-emitting diodes and lasers
Read article: Light emission moves into the blue
In The Crystal Egg, a short story written in 1897, HG Wells describes how a remarkable object in Mr Cave’s Curiosity Shop allows its owner to gaze at a real-time image from the surface of Mars while sitting in a darkened room on Earth. A century later, we can all do much the same thing, […]
Paul Dirac published the first of his papers on "The Quantum Theory of the Electron" 70 years ago this month. The Dirac equation, derived in those papers, is one of the most important equations in physics
Read article: Paul Dirac: the purest soul in physics
Luckily the literature is not like a barrel of apples and one bad paper will not ruin all of the others. There are also different types of mistakes with different consequences. Deliberate mistakes are the most damaging and, on the basis of recent high-profile cases, such scientific fraud is largely a problem for life scientists […]
This volume, sixth in an ongoing series of works by Princeton University Press, contains some of Albert Einstein’s more important papers on quantum theory and general relativity. Early versions of some of these papers had numerous inaccuracies in the text. This was because of the “publish or be damned” attitude prevalent at the time. Many […]
On 10 December 1997, after a session lasting two days and nights virtually without a break, politicians at the climate summit in Kyoto, Japan, agreed a protocol limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases from developed countries. The agreement is not as strong as many countries and environmental groups would have liked – and participants have […]
Germany is thought to have some of the most highly trained and productive workers in the world. However, new data from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) in London show that workers in the US are even more productive and British workers come third. “The main reason for taking an interest in […]
France's newest nuclear physics facility - the SPIRAL facility for radioactive nuclear beams in Caen - has accelerated its first beams
Frank Marshall, Will Zhang and Eric Gotthelf from the Goddard Space Flight Center, and John Middleditch of Los Alamos National Laboratory found the star by studying data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray satellite. They have calculated that the star is spinning over 60 times per second, twice as fast as any previously known pulsar. The pulsar […]
