Arrived and ready
The 21 hour door-to-door trip is past us now as we focus on the start of the conference tomorrow. We arrived at the hotel early on Sunday morning after a quick connection in Chicago. The whole trip fr...
Off to New Orleans
Michael and I are leaving for New Orleans bright and early tomorrow morning — along with five other colleagues from IOP Publishing. Our journey begins in Bristol at about 9.30 in the morning and...
Looking forward to Chicago 2009
For those of you who went to this year’s AAAS meeting in Boston, now is a chance to sip coffee, recover from jet lag and go over all those indecipherable notes you took so hastily. For those of you ...
Vector inflation points the way
New model sheds light on universe’s near-smoothness
Who gets the cash?
“Is the title an oxymoron?” Harold Shapiro asked rhetorically at the beginning of his talk, The Responsible Use of Public Resources in Elementary Particle Physics. He wanted to show how one goes a...
Nuclear unknowns
Don Geesman of Argonne National Laboratory is well-known not only for his work on quarks but also for serenading his audience with folk songs about underground neutrino detectors (“For it’s dark a...
Freebie round-up
There’s not a fantastic selection of freebies at this year’s AAAS meeting, although there are one or two gems. A brain that sticks to walls, a pen that unfolds at the push of a button and — if y...
Refashioning American science
The US science funding cuts revealed in last year’s omnibus bill were a terrific blow to US physicists, with Fermilab in particular being forced to lay-off 200 of its staff. If it doesn’t recover,...
Journalists speak out
It’s not often that journalists are the ones being quoted. And going by the attendance of this afternoon’s symposium, Global warming heats up: how the media covers climate change, a lot of people ...
A public risk
Nanotechnology has proved to be a gold mine for applied physics, and by 2015 recent predictions suggest that it could have generated a $1 trillion global market. That’s not very surprising: new appl...
