Gas cloud defines extragalactic distance
The team were able to measure the distance because NGC4258 is one of 22 nearby galaxies that have active nuclei consisting of a supermassive black hole (over 100 million solar masses) surrounded by a ...
Physicists prove Van Gogh painting is not a forgery
Scientists at the research laboratory of the Museums of France in Paris compared the painting with nine of the 70 works accredited to Van Gogh during his time at Auvers. However, they were not allowed...
Universities are like businesses – it’s official
Stanley and colleagues looked at five different measures of research activity in universities: the annual expenditure on R&D, the number of papers published each year, the number of patents awarde...
Physics research to get Lottery funding
Jeremy Newton, chief executive of NESTA, says that the fund will support projects across the whole spectrum of science, art and technology, particularly interdisciplinary research. But with such a wid...
The brain is ‘classical’
Nearly all the quantum models of the brain depend on how long the brain can keep quantum coherence. Penrose argues for example, that microtubles – small hollow cylinders that help cells keep the...
British workers at JET accept pay deal
During the 1980s the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg agreed that the British workers had been discriminated against, and in 1996 the court ordered the European Commission to settle the case. T...
Astronomers attempt to reclaim the skies
The meeting, “Preserving the Astronomical Sky,” was held in Austria a few days before UNISPACE III, a major conference sponsored by the United Nations (UN) that will look at the impact and...
Newspaper heightens collider fears
The RHIC seeks to recreate the primordial “soup” of particles that existed immediately after the big bang and from which everyday matter formed. Today quarks only exist inside strongly int...
Shuttle launches X-ray telescope
X-ray observations with Chandra will complement infrared images from the Hubble Space Telescope and higher-energy observations by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Chandra will have a resolution that...
The topology of the Internet
There are already over 300 million documents on the Internet, and only 34% of them have been catalogued by the most popular search engines such as Hotbot. This has made the topology of the Internet ex...
