Physics fails to keep pace in the UK
Most of the extra money – £300m over three years – will go on a £600m Joint Infrastructure Fund that the government is setting up with the Wellcome Trust, the world’s large...
Why some papers last longer that others
The survey was carried out by using the Science Citation Index to count the number of citations received by papers published in 1954 volume of the Astrophysical Journal in each of the 40 following yea...
Quantum teleportation goes beyond two states
In quantum teleportation the quantum state of an object held by “Alice” is instantaneously sent to “Bob”. The technique works by sending one half of an “entangled” ...
Microsoft’s war cry for science investment
Myhrvold confirms the link between basic research and profit by pointing out that technology companies founded in the last 30 years that rely on basic research carried out since the second World War n...
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...
