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...
Read article: Hubble back in business
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...
Measuring decoherence in real time
Quantum particles such as electrons can be in a superposition of two or more quantum states. This means that an electron can, for instance, be in two places at the same time. However, classical object...
Overlooking female innovation in science
Hamilton came to her conclusions after studying the writings of female scientists over the past two and a half thousand years, and reading descriptions of women scientists by others. She analysed the ...
Physicist queries test-ban evidence to US Senate
Since the US stopped testing in 1992 it has relied on the “stockpile Stewardship” programme to maintain the reliability and safety of its nuclear weapons. But a number of misconceptions we...
‘Naked’ black holes seen
Black holes are usually detected by the effects of their vast gravitational field on the orbits of nearby astronomical objects such as stars. Naked black holes have no such material near them making i...
