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
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&#...
Read article: Astronomers find middleweight black hole
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...
First evidence for the Brain Drain
Sharp Pierson and Cotgreave of the Save British Science Society analysed the publishing records of 252 scientists who gained their doctoral degrees in the UK. They compared the quality of the scientis...
Sonic crystals make the sound barrier
The crystals themselves are constructed from lead balls 1 cm in diameter, coated with a 2.5-mm layer of silicone rubber, and placed inside an epoxy matrix. The strong periodic variation in density cre...
Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
Davis’ team developed a three-dimensional model to pinpoint possible underground focusing structures after analysing aftershock data and the local geological structure. The north-dipping Santa M...
Read article: Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
