South Africa approves new telescope
Astronomers involved with the project hope to use a lightweight multi-segment design similar to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas, which cost only about 20 per cent of what it would cost to bu...
Super-Kamiokande finds neutrino mass
Neutrinos come in three types – electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos – and only interact very weakly with matter, which makes them extremely difficult to detect. Neutrino d...
City risk pays off for physicists
In 1992 seven postgraduate students started their PhDs in the high-energy physics group at Imperial College, London. Six years later, three of them now work in international finance in the City of Lon...
Blood tests without needles
Recognising blood cells presents a big challenge for automated counting systems. As blood flows through veins, the cells are deformed in the direction of blood flow. Blood also contains a lot of other...
Shuttle goes on ‘antimatter’ hunt
The known universe consists almost entirely of matter. However, it is thought that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created during the big bang. One possibility is that this antimatter now ...
Superfluid helium as a vacuum
In an ingenious series of experiments the Göttingen team squirted liquid helium through a fine nozzle to create drops containing about 104 atoms at a temperature of 0.1 K. The team used laser spectro...
Fibre gives X-ray generation a boost
The efficiency with which light of one frequency is converted into a higher frequency in a nonlinear material increases when both frequencies travel through the material with the same phase velocity. ...
Has Hubble photographed an extrasolar planet?
Terebey and colleagues believe that the new planet was in orbit around two stars – TMR-1A and -1B – before it was ejected by a gravitational slingshot mechanism. The planet then created a ...
Pakistan retaliates with nuclear tests
Sharif claimed on national television that the country had exploded five nuclear devices. Presently only two explosions -with 12 and 25 kiloton yields – have been confirmed by seismic monitoring...
First light for Europe’s new telescope
The VLT uses active optics to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence on observations. In this technique the optical quality of a star is continually monitored against a reference star and the sur...
