Black hole alert for astronomers
When a star explodes as a supernova, the remnants of the explosion can fall inwards to form a neutron star or a black hole. Neutron stars are easy to detect because they emit powerful radio waves. Bla...
Falling objects: new twists on an old problem
Andrew Belmonte of the University of Pittsburgh, and Hagai Eisenberg and Elisha Moses of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel dropped thin strips of plastic, brass and steel in various liquids ...
Satellite email on the cheap
Satellites have been used to provide email access in isolated regions of the world for at least eight years. Until now, however, all such systems have relied on bulky equipment costing tens of thousan...
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,...
