Webwatchers avoid cloudy eclipse
The European satellite organisation Eumetsat will update pictures every 10 minutes of the Moon’s shadow as it rushes across the globe. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has brought together a...
Physicists call on Senate to ratify treaty
The Senate has become increasingly vocal about alleged Chinese spying at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (see PhysicsWeb 28 May) and has argued for increased security at the nuclear weapons labs. B...
France joins UK synchrotron project
The UK synchrotron, once known as Diamond, is intended to replace the ageing second-generation SRS machine at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, although the location of the new machine has still t...
Gas cloud defines extragalactic distance
The team were able to measure the distance because NGC4258 is one of 22 nearby galaxies that have active nuclei consisting of a supermassive black hole (over 100 million solar masses) surrounded by a ...
New light on the Solar corona
The solar corona reaches temperatures of 1 million degrees Kelvin, while the Sun’s surface – the photosphere – is only 6000 Kelvin. The researchers used the UV camera on TRACE to cre...
Quantum dots become more ‘atom-like’
Banin and co-workers used quantum dots made of indium arsenide, covered with a nonconducting barrier of hexane dithiol molecules and linked to a conducting gold film. The radius of the nearly spherica...
Nanotubes and supercurrents
The fantastic progress in the miniaturization of electronic devices that has taken place in the past few decades has largely been made possible by perfecting a century-old technique called lithography...
Physicists prove Van Gogh painting is not a forgery
Scientists at the research laboratory of the Museums of France in Paris compared the painting with nine of the 70 works accredited to Van Gogh during his time at Auvers. However, they were not allowed...
Universities are like businesses – it’s official
Stanley and colleagues looked at five different measures of research activity in universities: the annual expenditure on R&D, the number of papers published each year, the number of patents awarde...
British workers at JET accept pay deal
During the 1980s the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg agreed that the British workers had been discriminated against, and in 1996 the court ordered the European Commission to settle the case. T...
