ESA gets flexible
The three space science missions are: STORMS, a set of three spacecraft that will be used to monitor magnetic storms in space; SOLAR ORBITER, a mission to study the surface and atmosphere of the Sun i...
Burning mystery remains
The group studied three different weights of paper in their experiments. Sheets of paper were place in a combustion chamber and lit by an electric wire. The propagating front of the fire was recorded ...
New technique promises cheaper photonic crystals
The method works by solidifying a resin that hardens when exposed to light. The resin is solidified into a three-dimensional grid by placing it in the interference pattern set up by four intersecting ...
Fractional effects in nanotubes explained
The quantum of conductance, G0, is defined by a simple equation: G0=2e2/h, where e is the charge on the electron and h is the Planck constant. The conductance of an individual nanotube is predicted to...
World order upset by new citation study
Using citation data from the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia, Katz has found that there is in fact a power-law or “fractal” relationship between the number of citation...
The music of earthquakes
Diodati says he became intrigued by the link between music and physics after thinking about the crescendo in Rossini’s La calunnia è un venticello, an aria from the Barber of Seville. The w...
Dark matter claim meets resistance
The DAMA collaboration, which is lead by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, will present its results at the Fourth International Symposium on Sources and Detection of Dark Matter/Energy in the U...
Magnetic microchips to process information
The number of transistors on a silicon chip has doubled every 18 months, but many observers believe that semiconductor technology will reach its limit in a decade or so. This has prompted the developm...
Physics in a bubble
The MIT team injected small quantities of air into a highly viscous liquid to stimulate the formation of air bubbles. As the bubbles reached the surface, da Silveira and colleagues punctured them with...
New phase for quantum computers
One of the biggest challenges in quantum computation is to built “fault tolerant” logic gates. In the mid-1990s it was shown that this requires the time evolution of a quantum sub-system t...
