Sonic crystals make the sound barrier
The crystals themselves are constructed from lead balls 1 cm in diameter, coated with a 2.5-mm layer of silicone rubber, and placed inside an epoxy matrix. The strong periodic variation in density cre...
Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
Davis’ team developed a three-dimensional model to pinpoint possible underground focusing structures after analysing aftershock data and the local geological structure. The north-dipping Santa M...
Read article: Bad vibrations from acoustic lenses
Higgs boson on the horizon
Tully and co-workers have combined the data from the four experiments at LEP and found evidence that the Higgs boson has a mass of 114.9 GeV c-2. ‘It is a 2.6 sigma effect,’ he t...
Exciting times for heavy nuclei
The researchers at the French GANIL accelerator studied heavy, highly charged ions, in which the attraction between the nucleus and the remaining electrons is extremely strong. As a result, the differ...
No thing goes faster than light
Nothing can travel faster than light. Despite a recent raft of reports in the media, this statement is as true now as it ever was. Nonetheless, experiments over the past 20 years have been forcing us ...
Read article: No thing goes faster than light
Europa: water, water everywhere
The latest evidence comes from an analysis of the magnetic fields surrounding Europa. When a conducting body is placed inside a time-varying magnetic field, electrical currents are induced inside the ...
Read article: Europa: water, water everywhere
Argon makes a cold compound
Argon is the lightest yet of the inert gases to have formed a compound. It is difficult to persuade light inert gases to react because their outer electrons are shielded less from the electrostatic pu...
Old galaxies, new problems
The expansion of the universe means that the light from distant galaxies is red-shifted when observed on Earth. The larger the red shift, the greater the distance to the galaxy. Moreover, when we view...
Sandage and Peebles win cosmology prize
Sandage is best known for his efforts to pin down the values of the Hubble constant, the age of the Universe and its deceleration parameter through observations. Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist w...
Organic superconductivity
Hendrik Schon, Christian Kloc and Batlogg investigated three different acenes: anthracene (which contains three linked rings), tetracene (four) and pentacene (five). The crystals are normally insulati...
