Read article: Triumph of the small business
Triumph of the small business
Matin Durrani looks at physics-based companies that have succeeded in dominating their market
Read article: Triumph of the small business
Read article: What it’s like to be in business
What it’s like to be in business
Bob Claridge explains what skills you require to succeed as a physicist in the hard-nosed world of business
Read article: Physics goes commercial
Physics goes commercial
Physics has dined out on the invention of the transistor, the laser and various medical scanners for years. However, the success of these inventions has depended on researchers leaving their labs R...
Read article: Pack your cherries to perfection
Pack your cherries to perfection
A burning issue for fatties like me is whether you can make a low-fat Black Forest gateau. The answer, surprisingly, can be found in two new science books. The Pursuit of Perfect Packing by Tomaso Ast...
Read article: Industry warms to superconductors
Industry warms to superconductors
While theorists have been battling to understand high-temperature superconductivity, industry is developing devices ready for a global marketplace potentially worth billions of dollars
Behind closed doors
One of the challenges facing any physics magazine is to adequately cover the activities and interests of physicists working in industry. For a long time Physics World has followed a policy that the be...
IT holds the key to growth
Investment in “knowledge”, which is defined as research and development, software and public spending on education, now accounts for 8% of the OECD’s total gross domestic product (GD...
Patents versus patience
Physicists are rightly proud of the way that basic research in the past has paid off in terms of technology that is widely used everyday. We all know the examples: transistors, lasers, optical fibres,...
US dominates world patents
The National Science Foundation report also discovered that the US, Russia and Japan have the lowest number of patents awarded to foreign inventors. In all the other countries surveyed, over two-third...
Small companies get the EU research bug
According to the report, over 80% of the SMEs that received an award during 1995-97 had never taken part in an EU project before, and some 8000 companies had never been involved in any sort of public ...
