New observatory to solve cosmic puzzle
Cosmic rays are particles from outer space that continually bombard the Earth. The nature and origin of cosmic rays with energies below 1015 eV are well understood. However, physicists have no idea of...
Rolf Landauer, a unique physicist, dies
Landauer was born in Stuttgart in 1927 but had to leave Germany because his family was Jewish. He studied physics at Harvard University in the United States and joined IBM after two years at the Natio...
Europe losing space race
ESA’s ruling body – the council of ministers – will meet later this month to discuss the agency’s budget for the next four years. Antonio Rodotà, ESA’s director gene...
Why cautious people lose
Johnson and colleagues specified “winners and losers” by making the “agents”, as the individuals are called, repeatedly choose between two rooms. Choosing the room denotes a &#...
Array signals new era of ground-based astronomy
ALMA will gather highly red-shifted radiation from the furthest stars and galaxies, and will allow astronomers to observe cool dark objects such as brown dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds. The ALMA ...
World’s most expensive sundial
The aluminium sundial features rings representing the orbits of Mars and Earth, and red and blue dots showing the position of the two planets at the time of the landing. Once safely installed on Mars,...
Read article: World’s most expensive sundial
Sharper image for polycrystalline materials
Polycrystalline materials contain lots of tiny crystals oriented randomly in space. Thomas Wessels, Christian Baerlocher and Lynne McCusker from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Züric...
Multi-planet system startles astronomers
Upsilon Andromedae is a yellow G-type star similar to the Sun. In 1996 Geoffrey Marcy from San Francisco State University, together with Butler, discovered one planet by observing a ‘wobble̵...
The most distant object in theuniverse
Galaxies with extremely large redshifts are hard to detect as the radiation they emit shifts to longer wavelengths that are easily absorbed by giant intergalactic hydrogen clouds. Another problem is t...
Physics looks to thefuture
The three-day workshop was held in Debreccen in Hungary last month and involved physicists from both eastern and western Europe. Delegates were concerned about a number of ‘serious problems̵...
