Fractals determine date of paintings
The physicists scanned a series of Pollock’s artworks into a computer and masked each painting with a series of grids. They then counted the number of squares that contained part of the painted ...
Read article: Hubble finds planetary transition point
Hubble finds planetary transition point
The results help to confirm the view that other planetary systems form in ways similar to our solar system. The Kuiper belt is a disk of dust, gas and icy comets stretching from 40 to 10000 times the ...
Café society gets scientific
French cafés have long been a meeting point for intellectuals. In the 18th century Victor Hugo met fellow revolutionaries at the Procope in Paris, and in the 1950s groups of existentialists, incl...
First collisions at BaBar
The collisions are termed “asymmetric” because the electrons are accelerated to 9 GeV – three times the energy of the positrons. As the two beams collide, they generate B mesons that...
Read article: Game, set and slower match
Game, set and slower match
To many sports fans, the month of June is synonymous with the Wimbledon tennis tournament. Thousands of people will flock to the All England Lawn Tennis Club to watch the players battle it out on the ...
Phase diagram hints at traffic solution
Helbing and co-workers have identified six different traffic phases: homogeneous congestion, oscillatory congestion, triggered stop-and-go traffic, moving localised clusters, pinned localised clusters...
US nuclear labs step up security
The report has already led to security being tightened at all laboratories run the Department of Energy, including those at Los Alamos and Livermore. Fears over the new security regime – visitor...
Hubble constant starts to settle down
The Hubble team, led by Wendy Freedman of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has spent the last eight years using the telescope to make more accurate measurements of the Hubb...
e/5 particles discovered
In 1980 Klaus von Klitzing discovered that the so-called Hall conductance across a material varied in steps, not continuously, as the magnetic field was changed. In other words the Hall effect was qua...
Nanotubes muscle in on ‘smart materials’
The new technique works because the salt water conducts electricity. As the voltage on the tape changes, electrical charge carriers are injected into the nanotubes. These form electrolyte ions near th...
