The music of earthquakes
Diodati says he became intrigued by the link between music and physics after thinking about the crescendo in Rossini’s La calunnia è un venticello, an aria from the Barber of Seville. The w...
World order upset by new citation study
Using citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, Katz has found that there is in fact a power-law or “fractal” relationship between the number of citation...
Dark matter claim meets resistance
The DAMA collaboration, which is lead by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, will present its results at the Fourth International Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter/Energy in the U...
Magnetic microchips to process information
The number of transistors on a silicon chip has doubled every 18 months, but many observers believe that semiconductor technology will reach its limit in a decade or so. This has prompted the developm...
Physics in a bubble
The MIT team injected small quantities of air into a highly viscous liquid to stimulate the formation of air bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface, da Silveira and colleagues punctured them with...
New phase for quantum computers
One of the biggest challenges in quantum computation is to built “fault tolerant” logic gates. In the mid-1990s it was shown that this requires the time evolution of a quantum sub-system t...
Atom opticians think small
Mara Prentiss and colleagues at Harvard University in the US mounted two short wires on a sapphire substrate (Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 1124). When electric currents flow in opposite directions through the ...
Black holes ‘mimic’ the Sun
The team claim to have evidence for: an thin outer layer that is hot; a warm middle layer that is also optically thick; and a “cold” inner layer. The similarity of these layers to that of ...
Climate discrepancy solved
Previously is was thought that the result might have been due to some inadequacy in the data for the troposphere. However, Dian Gaffen from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and c...
New light on organic LEDs
Light emission from organic materials occurs through two separate processes: fluorescence – the process by which today’s organic semiconductors produce light – and phosphorescence. I...
