SOLEIL synchrotron for Saclay
The intense X-rays from SOLEIL will be used for a range of experiments in physics, chemistry and biology. The machine is expected to come on-line in 2005. According to Schwartzenberg, the French gover...
Superconductivity: getting warmer
The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in 1986 raised hopes that loss-free superconducting power cables would be able to operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Previously, superconducto...
Read article: Ulysses probes the solar maximum
Ulysses probes the solar maximum
“Solar activity has been increasing for the past three or four years, and now Ulysses has started observing much more disturbed conditions at increasing solar latitudes,” explains Andre Ba...
Read article: Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
Davis’ team developed a three-dimensional model to pinpoint possible underground focusing structures after analysing aftershock data and the local geological structure. The north-dipping Santa M...
Breaking through the quantum limit
Andrey Geim of the Universities of Nijmegen and Manchester, and co-workers from Russia, Belgium and the UK, measured the amount of flux entering micron-sized aluminium discs, where edge effects are im...
First evidence for the Brain Drain
Sharp Pierson and Cotgreave of the Save British Science Society analysed the publishing records of 252 scientists who gained their doctoral degrees in the UK. They compared the quality of the scientis...
Nanoscientists go on a roll
Whereas the carbon atoms in a graphite sheet are arranged in hexagons, the fullerene form of carbon includes both pentagons and hexagons. The first fullerene to be discovered, carbon-60, contains 12 p...
Sonic crystals make the sound barrier
The crystals themselves are constructed from lead balls 1 cm in diameter, coated with a 2.5-mm layer of silicone rubber, and placed inside an epoxy matrix. The strong periodic variation in density cre...
Higgs boson on the horizon
Tully and co-workers have combined the data from the four experiments at LEP and found evidence that the Higgs boson has a mass of 114.9 GeV c-2. ‘It is a 2.6 sigma effect,’ he t...
Exciting times for heavy nuclei
The researchers at the French GANIL accelerator studied heavy, highly charged ions, in which the attraction between the nucleus and the remaining electrons is extremely strong. As a result, the differ...
