Hawking and Rotblat choose their favourites
Hawking was one of ten famous names asked by the National Portrait Galley to pick photographs that defined the 20th century. He was the only scientist in a group that included the film producer David ...
How the Nobel prize was won
The Nobel Foundation chooses Nobel prize winners with the utmost secrecy. But in 1974 it agreed to allow historians access to any of its archives over fifty year old. Since then Crawford has documente...
Achieving optical super resolution
When light hits an object, diffraction causes the beam to spread over an area that depends on the aperture of the lens. The phase filters make this area smaller but also cause a reduction in the beam ...
ESA maps out a Martian future
At a cost of ECU 150 m Mars Express is already the cheapest space mission ever proposed for the red planet. However, scientists on the committee are worried that if costs on Mars Express escalate, the...
Evidence mounts that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating
Astronomers have been puzzling over the expansion rate of the Universe and its mass for decades. If the mass of the Universe is large enough, the expansion will eventually decrease and the Universe wi...
Magnetic resonance sniffs out bad wine
Recent developments in the use of high magnetic fields and pulsed NMR techniques have made it possible to probe the structure of organic compounds as complex as proteins. Imaging machines based on the...
Stars hint at Shakespeare’s identity
The foundation of Altschuler’s argument is that although the plays refer to many astronomical events that occurred before de Vere’s death in 1604 – such as the supernova in 1572 and ...
UK plans £65m facility
The UK at present has no nuclear physics facilities of its own, and very little investment in facilities overseas. “SIRIUS would open up many opportunities in a number of areas, most notably in ...
US tops research league table
Germany has a much less even pattern of citation than the US or England, with strengths in certain core fields, including physical sciences, maths and engineering, and weaknesses in economics and soci...
Physics fails to keep pace in the UK
Most of the extra money – £300m over three years – will go on a £600m Joint Infrastructure Fund that the government is setting up with the Wellcome Trust, the world’s large...
