Why cautious people lose
Johnson and colleagues specified “winners and losers” by making the “agents”, as the individuals are called, repeatedly choose between two rooms. Choosing the room denotes a &#...
Read article: World’s most expensive sundial
World’s most expensive sundial
The aluminium sundial features rings representing the orbits of Mars and Earth, and red and blue dots showing the position of the two planets at the time of the landing. Once safely installed on Mars,...
Multi-planet system startles astronomers
Upsilon Andromedae is a yellow G-type star similar to the Sun. In 1996 Geoffrey Marcy from San Francisco State University, together with Butler, discovered one planet by observing a ‘wobble̵...
Physics looks to thefuture
The three-day workshop was held in Debreccen in Hungary last month and involved physicists from both eastern and western Europe. Delegates were concerned about a number of ‘serious problems̵...
Sharper image for polycrystalline materials
Polycrystalline materials contain lots of tiny crystals oriented randomly in space. Thomas Wessels, Christian Baerlocher and Lynne McCusker from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Züric...
The most distant object in theuniverse
Galaxies with extremely large redshifts are hard to detect as the radiation they emit shifts to longer wavelengths that are easily absorbed by giant intergalactic hydrogen clouds. Another problem is t...
Lasers fuel path to fusion
The clusters were produced by expanding a deuterium gas jet into a vacuum. A laser beam focussed near the top of the plume heats the clusters, causing them to explode. This creates a small plasma of h...
Nuclear monitoring network passes first test
Governments that have signed the CTBT – which will come into force this September – are concerned that countries such as Iran, India and Iraq might try to develop so called ‘sub-crit...
Telescopes on the cheap?
This is not the first time that astronomers have considered using rotating platters of liquid – usually mercury – for a central mirror. For example, a mercury-based telescope would cost on...
New look for PhysicsWeb
As part of the redesign we have also moved the In Depth and Patent News services to the News section, and moved WebWatch to a new expanded Reviews section. We have also put the 1997 and 1998 indexes f...
