Old galaxies, new problems
The expansion of the universe means that the light from distant galaxies is red-shifted when observed on Earth. The larger the red shift, the greater the distance to the galaxy. Moreover, when we view...
Sandage and Peebles win cosmology prize
Sandage is best known for his efforts to pin down the values of the Hubble constant, the age of the Universe and its deceleration parameter through observations. Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist w...
Organic superconductivity
Hendrik Schon, Christian Kloc and Batlogg investigated three different acenes: anthracene (which contains three linked rings), tetracene (four) and pentacene (five). The crystals are normally insulati...
DNA ‘tweezers’ take shape
Bernard Yurke from Lucent Technologies in the US, Andrew Turberfield from Oxford University in the UK and Lucent, and co-workers constructed the tweezers from three separate strands of DNA. DNA molecu...
Dirac medal goes to particle theorists
Georgi, Pati and Quinn were honoured for their “pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions.” Wor...
Cluster takes shape
The Rumba and Tango satellites were sent into space on board a French-Russia launcher. Over the next week they will rendezvous with the Salsa and Samba satellites that were launched on July 16. The fo...
Read article: New planets and star birth in Manchester
New planets and star birth in Manchester
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will present evidence for what it believes is the youngest massive star cluster ever detected in the Milky Way. It contains about 100 type-O stars, th...
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...
