Gamma-ray bursts spring more surprises
There are a number of reasons why GRB980425 is associated with SN1998bw. Both occurred at the same time, at the same location and in the same direction as each other. SN1998bw is also a rare Type Ib/c...
Physics solves blood vessel mystery
Experiments on the effect have been performed by introducing a compound called angiotensin II into the blood stream of a rat. This compound narrows the diameter of the blood vessels, which increases t...
Quantum physics breakthrough wins Nobel Prize
Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional qu...
Physicists win Nobel Prize for Chemistry
Understanding how molecules behave on the quantum level can help develop new drugs or improve the synthesis of chemical products. However, the underlying mathematics behind quantum chemistry are excee...
Russia sells research time
In the deal NASA gains Russia’s research time during the first four to five years of the space station’s construction, the rights to store experiments onboard a Russian-built module and th...
Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
Wireless quantum encryption
The technique is based on characteristics of individual photons that are generated randomly between the sender and the receiver. Although researchers have already transmitted quantum encryption keys t...
PhD theses to go online
The DFG has been experimenting with different ways of digitizing postgraduate dissertations for some time. These documents are usually one of the hardest sets of scientific information to access becau...
Higgs search loses a fortnight
With a collision energy of 189 GeV, LEP is currently the world’s highest energy electron-positron collider. It was originally due to be shut down at the end of this year, but physicists working ...
India and Pakistan lied about nuclear tests
These latest results, according to Barker et al., indicate “high confidence” that the network being set up to monitor the CTBT can indeed verify small nuclear explosions. Concerns over the...
