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...
Shuttle launches X-ray telescope
X-ray observations with Chandra will complement infrared images from the Hubble Space Telescope and higher-energy observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will have a resolution that...
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...
Laser emits multi-wavelength light
Semiconductor lasers are usually monocromatic because the electrons stored in energy bands do not emit any photons unless they move out of the semiconductor’s conduction band. Federico Capasso a...
Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
India and Pakistan lied about nuclear tests
These latest results, according to Barker et al., indicate “high confidence” that the network being set up to monitor the CTBT can indeed verify small nuclear explosions. Concerns over the...
