Atom opticians think small
Mara Prentiss and colleagues at Harvard University in the US mounted two short wires on a sapphire substrate (Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 1124). When electric currents flow in opposite directions through the ...
Conductivity measurements made on a single strand of DNA
The Delft group fabricated the electrodes by making a slit in a silicon nitride film with standard lithography. A series of platinum layers were then sputtered across the slit until the gap was reduce...
Life, longevity, and a $6000 bet
The disagreement stems from a paper Gott published in Nature several years ago and recently discussed in the New Yorker magazine. In this paper Gott proposed a formula that suggests that by knowing ho...
Molecules made in a Bose-Einstein Condensate
Molecules are poor candidates for the standard techniques used to create Bose-Einstein condensates because of their complicated internal vibrational and rotational structures. But by creating the mole...
CERN claims quark-gluon first
In the CERN experiments a 33 TeV lead ion beam was crashed into targets made of lead and gold inside the seven different experimental detectors. The collisions created energy densities twenty times th...
X-ray telescope burns-up
Meanwhile, ESA this week released the first two images from XMM-Newton. One shows the Magellanic Cloud, with hot gas released from supernova explosions and new stars being created in a interstellar nu...
Read article: X-ray telescope burns-up
Physics and life in a cold climate
Antarctica is full of submerged lakes that have been trapped under kilometres of ice for millions of years. The most famous – and largest – of these hidden lakes is Lake Vostok. Price has ...
New light on ball lightning
Ball lightning has only been seen during thunderstorms. The average ball lightning appears as a sphere about 30 cm across and lasts for about 10 seconds. The earliest reports of ball lightning date ba...
Quantum theory survives three-photon test
The conflict between quantum theory and local realism can be traced back to the work of Schrödinger and Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in 1935. It remained a philosophical matter until the 1960s wh...
Can physics save fish stocks?
Overfishing is a worldwide problem and many of the world’s fish stocks are severely depleted. A fundamental question in light of the current state of affairs is whether it is at all possible to ...
Read article: Can physics save fish stocks?
