Unmanned plane tries transatlantic record
Each plane has a 3m wingspan and weighs 13.1 kg. During normal operations the craft will measure temperature, humidity and pressure over the ocean. At a cost of just $25000 each, the planes could dram...
Cosmic rays: the puzzles continue
Speculation on the origin of high energy cosmic rays has existed for some time. The best candidates are massive supernova explosions or the decay of superheavy particles near the beginning of the univ...
European radio astronomers silence satellites
Signals produced by the satellites are over a 100 times stronger than the radio sources studied by astronomers. Under the new agreement, European radio astronomers will get 24 hours of ‘unpollut...
Global warming confirmed from space
Previously satellite measurements have suggested that the atmosphere was cooling at 0.05 Kelvin per decade, while ground-based instruments showed an increase of 0.13 Kelvin per decade. However, as pol...
Nanotubes grow up
The technique uses an iron-silica catalyst created by coating a quartz plate with an iron-silica solution. Once the solution dries it cracks into a film 30-50 microns thick. After the substrate is hea...
Product testing to destruction
Most automobile vibration testing is sinusoidal in nature, in which a regular pattern of rapid, slow and zero vibrations vary in a predictable pattern to mimic driving conditions. Hu’s random vi...
Scientists hail SOHO
“This is the best news I’ve heard since we lost contact with SOHO” says Roger Bonnet, ESA’s director of science. “We should just hope that the damage sustained by SOHO...
Field theorists win Dirac prize
The citation highlights Adler’s derivation of a sum rule for pion-nucleon scattering that marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the currents and broken symmetries of the strong interacti...
Making light work of gravity gradients
The interferometer was built by Mark Kasevich and colleagues at Yale University in the US and used individual atoms, rather than macroscopic man-made objects, to measure the gradient. By observing the...
Physicist named as Japan’s minister for education and science
Arima has long been a keen advocate for reforming Japanese science. Previously he helped shape the 1996 Basic Law for Science and Technology, which aimed to increase Japan’s spending on science....
