Nobel prize goes to ‘t Hooft and Veltman
‘t Hooft and Veltman were both born in the Netherlands. In 1966 Veltman was appointed as professor of physics at the University of Utrecht, and ‘t Hooft became his PhD student in 1969. By ...
Chemical physicist wins Nobel chemistry prize
Prior to Zewail’s work chemists had thought that chemical reactions occurred on the same time scale as molecular vibrations — that is, on the femtosecond scale. In the late 1980s, Zewail d...
Good news for the planet
Global warming – sometimes called the greenhouse effect – is caused by gases in the atmosphere that absorb and then re-emit infrared radiation, thereby ‘trapping’ the heat on t...
Organic magnets
The material – 1,3,5-trithia-2,4,6-triazapentalenyl (TTTA) – is non-magnetic at very low temperatures. The paramagnetic effect is strong at room temperature, but as the compound is cooled,...
Top quark and Bell’s inequalities top PhysicsWeb Nobel poll
Every year the Foundation asks 3000 physicists to nominate individuals for the prize, and compiles a short-list of 250 candidates. These names are then whittled down to a list of 30, from which the wi...
Filing cabinets hamper scientific research!
Scargle argues that there already exists a bias in individual scientific papers because researchers usually only publish statistical summaries of their data – not the raw data itself. But his ma...
Has Hubble seen dark matter?
When the astronomers – Rodrigo Ibata from the European Southern Observatory, Harvey Richer and Douglas Scott from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Ronald Gilliland from the Spac...
Do planets make diamonds from methane?
Lara Benedetti and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory sealed liquid methane between two diamond ‘...
Doubly magic nickel-48 surprises theorists
The name magic number comes from the shell model of the nucleus. The combined quantum mechanical effects of protons and neutrons in the nucleus can create energy shells similar to the electron energy ...
