Milky Way’s central black hole located
Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagit...
CODAG: watching dust gather
The CODAG experiment recreated for the first time conditions in the early solar system in order to observe the dust clustering process. Micron-sized silicon oxide grains were injected into a chamber f...
The bubble bursts for shrimps
Scientists originally thought the shrimps’ snapping sound was produced by mechanical contact between opposing sides of the claw. But Barbara Schmitz, a biologist at the Technical University of M...
Read article: The bubble bursts for shrimps
CERN chases the Higgs
“It was a difficult decision,” admitted Roger Cashmore, CERN’s director of research to Physics Web. “We wanted to give the experiments the opportunity to better test the effect...
Read article: CERN chases the Higgs
Astronomers find middleweight black hole
The black hole is around 600 light years from the centre of galaxy M82. “This black hole might eventually sink to the centre of the galaxy where it may grow to become a supermassive black hole&#...
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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...
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...
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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...
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...
