Big boost for British science
The government is to give the UK’s research councils an extra £400 million for new projects and £300 million to improve the infrastructure in Britain’s universities. The Wellcome...
Electronics with single atoms
Scheer and colleagues used a scanning tunnelling microscope, a mechanically controlled break junction, and lithography to fabricate various simple electronic circuits. These devices measured the effec...
‘Negative resistance’ surprises material scientists
Deborah Chung and Shoukai Wang of the University of Buffalo in the US stumbled across this unexpected behaviour whilst researching ‘smart’ materials. These materials, usually based on carb...
Physicists see the light in Nature
The brilliant colours in a butterfly’s wings, for example, are not produced by pigments alone. Instead a diffraction grating – a series of microscopic grooves on the surface of the wing &#...
New roles for defence research in the UK
The Ministry of Defence funds two research organizations: the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) and the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). The review calls on DERA, which carries out non-...
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...
