Abraham Pais dies
His best-known work was a biography of Einstein, Subtle is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, which was published in 1982 and won the 1983 American Book Award. Pais went on to publ...
Promising new materials for better nuclear waste storage
The so-called ‘complex oxides’ are a group of ceramics with a common chemical formula consisting of two pairs of metallic cations and seven oxygen atoms. Sickafus and co-workers at Los Ala...
Read article: Wobbling pulsar discovered
Wobbling pulsar discovered
Pulsars are rotating neutron stars, and are the collapsed cores of supergiant stars that have exploded as supernovae. They are extremely dense, typically 20 km across but with masses a million times g...
Read article: New life for Schrödinger’s cat
New life for Schrödinger’s cat
When the formalism of quantum mechanics is applied to experiments involving microscopic objects such as electrons, we often find that the resulting description assigns finite probability amplitudes to...
Strength is weakness on the Internet
In a ‘scale-free’ network of many interconnected nodes, like the Internet, most of the nodes are connected to a relatively small number of other nodes. Only a very small minority have a la...
Tau neutrino identified at last
The DONUT team fired an intense beam of neutrinos, which they expected to contain tau neutrinos, at a target consisting of iron plates with layers of emulsion sandwiched between them. One in a million...
Laser smashes light-speed record
Special relativity prevents any object with mass travelling at the speed of light, and the principle of causality – the notion that the cause comes before the effect – is used to rule out ...
Microscopy: two lasers are better than one
Stefan Hell and co-workers at Gottingen have adapted a technique known as fluorescence microscopy. In this form of microscopy the specimen is irradiated at a wavelength which excites either natural or...
Sir Mark Oliphant dies
Oliphant was born in Adelaide in 1901 and attended the local university before going to Cambridge University in 1927, where he worked on nuclear physics experiments with Ernest Rutherford. In 1937 he ...
Nuclei show their soft side
Helium-6 is a typical neutron-skin nucleus, with two of the neutrons forming a “skin” around the alpha-particle core. Different types of dynamics are possible in such nuclei. In the soft d...
