Chaos and the arms race
In the early 1960s Lloyd Richardson had developed a dynamic model to foresee the outbreak of war. He believed that there were three processes that a nation responds to: the external threat (the enemy)...
Scientists wobble over Earth’s tilt
Geologists have known for some time that ice sheets existed at the equator between 2, 400 and 2, 200 million years ago and then again between 820 and 550 million years ago. Their favourite theory to e...
The force of acoustics
“The idea of using white noise to mimic zero-point fluctuations is clever, ” said Steve Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. “The fundamentals are quite different f...
UK schools to get robotic telescope
Faulkes was educated at Hinckley Grammar School and at an early age specialised in science. He obtained a degree from Hull University and then went to London University to do a PhD in general relativi...
Experiment sees the arrow of time – at last!
Everyday experience tells us that it is impossible to travel backwards in time, no matter what science-fiction writers and movie directors tell us. However, this seemingly natural impossibility...
Laser emits multi-wavelength light
Semiconductor lasers are usually monocromatic because the electrons stored in energy bands do not emit any photons unless they move out of the semiconductor’s conduction band. Federico Capasso a...
Humans are the cause of climate change
The team looked in particular for ‘lag time’ effects in the data. For example, the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 lowered the global temperature by 0.3 C in the followi...
CERN plans global-warming experiment
Experimentalists at CERN will use a cloud chamber to mimic the Earth’s atmosphere in order to try and determine whether cloud formation is influenced by solar activity. According to the Danish t...
Uniform universe
The 1995 image was taken in a small patch near the Big Dipper constellation, which astronomers previously thought was completely blank. This new image taken by the Space Telescope Science Institute an...
All change at the top for US particle physics
Richter, 67, will remain on the faculty at Stanford University and will be the next president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics. Richter’s main achievements at SLAC have bee...
