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...
LHC start-up announced
Robert Aymar, director general of CERN, gave his talk on the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider with veteran poise. The particle accelerator, he said, will reveal the origin of mass, the nature of dark...
Golden age in scientific computing
Visualizing data really has come a long way. It may have started with geniuses like Galileo mapping the movement sunspots as a series of sketches, but four centuries later it is all about supercomputi...
An inspiration to all
Paul Kagame is the last person you would expect to see at a science meeting. Eighteen years ago he returned to his native Rwanda after 30 years of exile. In 1994, as the genocide against his people cl...
Do the maths
The first AAAS meeting was held on 20 September 1848. So, not including this one, how many meetings do you think they’ve had so far? 160? Wrong. According to page one, paragraph six of the FAQ secti...
A resolvable contradiction
“Boston…is America’s science town,” began David Baltimore at a breakfast buffet this morning. He was speaking to a room full of journalists in the Hynes Convention Center with the intentio...
