The mystery of Neptune’s rings
Neptune’s ring arcs were first observed by the Voyager spacecraft in 1984. In the absence of some external source of stability the rings would have been expected to decay within a matter of mont...
Evidence for supersymmetry found
Supersymmetry is an attractive theory to physicists as it provides a connection between all known elementary particles and can simplify many complex interactions. High energy supersymmetry suggests th...
Parisi wins Dirac medal
Parisi won the award for his work in a wide number of fields. The official citation highlights “his study of scaling violations in deep inelastic processes (Altarelli-Parisi equations), a model ...
Physicists call on Senate to ratify treaty
The Senate has become increasingly vocal about alleged Chinese spying at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (see PhysicsWeb 28 May) and has argued for increased security at the nuclear weapons labs. B...
Webwatchers avoid cloudy eclipse
The European satellite organisation Eumetsat will update pictures every 10 minutes of the Moon’s shadow as it rushes across the globe. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has brought together a...
France joins UK synchrotron project
The UK synchrotron, once known as Diamond, is intended to replace the ageing second-generation SRS machine at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, although the location of the new machine has still t...
New light on the Solar corona
The solar corona reaches temperatures of 1 million degrees Kelvin, while the Sun’s surface – the photosphere – is only 6000 Kelvin. The researchers used the UV camera on TRACE to cre...
Quantum dots become more ‘atom-like’
Banin and co-workers used quantum dots made of indium arsenide, covered with a nonconducting barrier of hexane dithiol molecules and linked to a conducting gold film. The radius of the nearly spherica...
Nanotubes and supercurrents
The fantastic progress in the miniaturization of electronic devices that has taken place in the past few decades has largely been made possible by perfecting a century-old technique called lithography...
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 ...
