Ultrafast X-rays watch matter melt
The germanium sample was bombarded with powerful laser pulses to excite the electrons and cause thermal melting. In this process, unlike normal melting, the metallic crystal goes from a cold solid to ...
NASA plans astrometric mission
Like ESA’s recent Hipparcos mission, FAME will use the parallax method to determine the stars’ positions: as the telescope and the Earth orbit the sun, the position of the stars will chang...
Chemical physicist wins Nobel chemistry prize
Prior to Zewail’s work chemists had thought that chemical reactions occurred on the same time scale as molecular vibrations — that is, on the femtosecond scale. In the late 1980s, Zewail d...
Scientists see electron orbits
In copper oxide each of the copper atoms is expected to bond with two oxygen atoms. According to some theories however, the copper atoms can covalently bond with each other. Such bonds – in whic...
France joins UK synchrotron project
The UK synchrotron, once known as Diamond, is intended to replace the ageing second-generation SRS machine at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, although the location of the new machine has still t...
Physicists prove Van Gogh painting is not a forgery
Scientists at the research laboratory of the Museums of France in Paris compared the painting with nine of the 70 works accredited to Van Gogh during his time at Auvers. However, they were not allowed...
Synchrotron up for grabs
“The meeting was extraordinarily successful in helping to bring people together,” says Siegbert Rather, director for physical sciences at the United Nations Educa-tional, Scientific and Cu...
Array signals new era of ground-based astronomy
ALMA will gather highly red-shifted radiation from the furthest stars and galaxies, and will allow astronomers to observe cool dark objects such as brown dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds. The ALMA ...
Sharper image for polycrystalline materials
Polycrystalline materials contain lots of tiny crystals oriented randomly in space. Thomas Wessels, Christian Baerlocher and Lynne McCusker from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Züric...
