DESY director, Bjorn Wiik, dies
Wiik was born in Norway in 1937. He moved to Germany in 1956 and after spending several years in the United States, joined the Hamburg laboratory in 1972. At DESY he was a member of the TASSO collabor...
Bucky ball memories
Buckyballs, nanotubes and related structures have great potential for storage applications because their small size offers the possibility of high switching speeds and low power consumption. However, ...
Putting the quantum brakes on light
Electromagnetically induced transparency relies on interference between different electronic transitions in an atom and has been used to make opaque media transparent at certain wavelengths in the pas...
Henry Kendall dies
Friedman, Kendall and Taylor scattered beams of high-energy electrons from liquid hydrogen and deuterium targets. They found that electrons were more likely to be scattered at large angles than was pr...
Physics, biscuits and the public
Scientists often complain that the media do not report their work. However, according to Fisher, this is not because journalists are not interested in science but because they have a fear of looking f...
Supersonic plasticity
Gumbsch and Gao also found that the supersonic speeds only occur when the stress is applied at a single point. At very low strains, the deformations travel subsonically. At intermediate strains, howev...
A ‘sticky’ theory
The French team studied the behaviour of air bubbles on the surface of the sticky polymer film attached to a metal probe. The number and size of the bubbles depends on the surface roughness of the fil...
Statistical physics challenges economics
Once the balance between ‘fundamentalists’ and noise traders is breached the market becomes more volatile and creates boom or bust cycles. For example, Amazon.com is now worth over $30 bil...
