Astronomers catch ‘planet-mania’
Greaves and colleagues used the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look at the dust around Epsilon Eridani. SCUBA operates at submillimetre wavelengths, where the glare...
Seeing light over contaminated soil
The device works by utilizing a small hydraulic ram attached on the back of a truck. When the vehicle is parked in the sample area, the ram fires a metal rod 30 m into the soil. At the top of the rod,...
Common framework for Europe moves closer
The move came about because the French government is frustrated at the slow pace of schemes run by the European Union, such as SOCRATES and the European credit transfer system. Allègre believes t...
Magnetic superglue promotes superconductivity
The Cambridge team studied two heavy fermion compounds: CeIn3 and CePd2Si2. Heavy fermion compounds are materials in which the conduction electrons acquire masses hundreds of times those of free elect...
British Isles reflect on the future of science
Irish scientists have been worried for some time about an apparent lack of direction in the government’s research policy, especially because of a fiasco with this year’s budget which resul...
Neutrino mass discovered
Neutrinos were first detected in 1956 by Fred Reines of the University of California at Irvine and the late George Cowan. They showed that a nucleus undergoing beta decay emits a neutrino with the ele...
Benefits of informal education
Delacôte suggests there are several lessons that can be applied to science popularisation in general: the emphasis must be on a ‘active experience’; the best techniques work for all a...
ESA demands new money
Antonio Rodota, ESA’s director general, has been campaigning to increase the amount of industrial involvement in the space agency. However it has been clear for many months that there would be s...
Gamma-ray bursts could test quantum gravity
Gamma-ray bursts appear to be related to the deaths of massive stars. Amelino-Camelia and colleagues claim that if the difference in the arrival times of photons with different energies can be measure...
Why earthquakes stop
The barriers found on fault lines are usually regions in which a strong pinning force reduces the movement of the plates. However geologists cannot define the position of these barriers around the fau...
