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 ...
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Literate physicist gets taste for fiction
White Mars is about a group of men and women who are marooned on Mars at the end of the 21st century. Living in enormous self-perpetuating domes, they produce their own food and oxygen, and extract wa...
Nanotubes get smaller
The 0.5 nm nanotube was made by boring a hole into a graphite rod. The hole was then filled with cobalt metal powder – which acts as a catalyst – and a mixture of nanotubes and other carbo...
Hubble back in business
Eskimo Nebula is 5000 light years from Earth and resembles a face inside a furry parka when viewed from ground-based telescopes. Hubble resolved the ‘hood’ into a disk of material containi...
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Neutrino pioneers win Wolf prize
In 1967 Davis, then at the Brookhaven National Lab, built the first experiment to detect neutrinos produced by the Sun. Neutrinos only interact weakly with matter and are extremely difficult to detect...
Polymer lasers without mirrors
The waveguide structure was created by pouring a mixture of copolymer solution and molecular laser dye into a mould situated on top of a silicon wafer. The solution was allowed to solidify over 12 hou...
