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...
Rolf Landauer, a unique physicist, dies
Landauer was born in Stuttgart in 1927 but had to leave Germany because his family was Jewish. He studied physics at Harvard University in the United States and joined IBM after two years at the Natio...
Read article: Light plays tricks with nuclei
Light plays tricks with nuclei
Just as electrons can be excited inside an atom, neutrons and protons can be excited from their ground states into higher-energy states inside the nucleus. If these states have long half-lifes then th...
Array signals new era of ground-based astronomy
ALMA will gather highly red-shifted radiation from the furthest stars and galaxies, and will allow astronomers to observe cool dark objects such as brown dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds. The ALMA ...
Europe losing space race
ESA’s ruling body – the council of ministers – will meet later this month to discuss the agency’s budget for the next four years. Antonio Rodotà, ESA’s director gene...
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 &#...
