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...
New director for Max Planck plasma lab
The IPP runs a tokamak called ASDEX and is also building a stellarator fusion device known as Wendelstein 7-X at it lab in Greifswald. If ITER is built in Japan, Bradshaw says he will lobby for Garchi...
New observatory to solve cosmic puzzle
Cosmic rays are particles from outer space that continually bombard the Earth. The nature and origin of cosmic rays with energies below 1015 eV are well understood. However, physicists have no idea of...
Radiation causes hidden DNA damage
Li-Jun Wu from Columbia University and colleagues from Colorado State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences used the radiological research accelerator at Columbia to pass precise quantities o...
