Sunlight moves asteroids
Some asteroids are pulled into near-Earth orbits by gravitational resonance effects created by the combined pulls of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. However, it has been known for many years that another me...
Heavy nuclei start to shape up
The existence of superheavy elements was predicted about 30 years ago on the basis of the nuclear shell model, which was originally developed in 1949. The model explains why nuclei with certain “...
DESY director, Bjorn Wiik, dies
Wiik was born in Norway in 1937. He moved to Germany in 1956 and after spending several years in the United States, joined the Hamburg laboratory in 1972. At DESY he was a member of the TASSO collabor...
Hubble upsets star-formation theories
The stellar history of local galaxies is calculated by plotting the different size and brightness of stars in the target galaxy. However, when viewed from Earth, star systems and star clusters can som...
Laser accelerators receive a boost
Physicists hope to develop new ways of accelerating particles because of the high cost and large size of traditional accelerators. Electrons in standard accelerators gain energy by surfing large elect...
Optical computing moves forward
The pairs are created by illuminating a semiconductor quantum well with a pulsed laser diode. A slight voltage difference on the semiconductor keeps the electron and the hole in separate levels inside...
Bucky ball memories
Buckyballs, nanotubes and related structures have great potential for storage applications because their small size offers the possibility of high switching speeds and low power consumption. However, ...
Henry Kendall dies
Friedman, Kendall and Taylor scattered beams of high-energy electrons from liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets. They found that electrons were more likely to be scattered at large angles than was pr...
