Pugwash calls for new roles for Aldermaston
Aldermaston has over 4000 employees and a budget of £300m. Over half of this (£168m) is spent on the manufacture, maintenance and testing of nuclear weapons, and on related research. Another...
Understanding avalanches
Snow avalanches occur when the mass of the snow overcomes the frictional resistance of the slope. This usually takes place when snow layers near the slope are loosened by spring rains or vibrations. D...
Galactic nuclei outdistances quasars
Wil van Breugel from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley and Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands found their galactic nucleus by looking for ...
Boost for UK physics
The JIF scheme is funded by the government and the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest biomedical research charity. It was established after several reports found that a shortage of state-of-the...
ESA tightens its belt
The ESA Council meeting, held in Brussels over the past two days, also formalised closer ties to the European Union. ESA hopes that the EU will become a major new source of funds for some of the indus...
Dispute threatens JET extension
Under the terms of the new European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA), JET would no longer carry out one common programme of work approved by the EU. Instead, the JET facilities would be run by the ...
Knots make polymers weaker
Polymers are long chain-like molecules made up of smaller molecules called monomers. It is well known that polymer chains often tie themselves in knots, but it was not clear how this influenced the me...
Magnetic mystery on Mars
Geophysicists realised that the Earth’s crust consisted of a series of tectonic plates when they noticed that as magma flowed out of the ocean ridges and cooled, iron in the magma magnetized in ...
Simulations hint at new asteroid belt
Astronomers have known about an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for nearly 200 years but it has only been in the past ten years that two other belts have been discovered. The Kuiper belt, a gro...
Arthur Schawlow, laser pioneer, dies
Schawlow was born in New York and educated at the University of Toronto, where he received his first degree in 1941 and his PhD in 1949. After a spell at Columbia University, where he worked with Char...
