New light on plasma properties
Previous experiments found it difficult to measure plasma spectra because the high temperatures inside the plasma caused the spectral lines to blur. The Weizmann team solved the problem by adding oxyg...
Computers from chaos
It has been know for sometime that nature follows chaotic patterns that seem to allow organisms to respond to rapid changes in their environment. Sinha and Ditto have taken these equations further to ...
SOHO is safe
Luckily, SOHO drifted back into sunlight long enough to recharge its solar cells for communications with Earth, and in the past month the fuel has been heated from -100 C to 10 C. Engineers had to be ...
Trapping breakthrough for molecules
Many of the optical and magnetic techniques used to trap and cool atoms do not work with molecules because they have complex internal energy levels. Instead Doyle and his colleagues chilled the molecu...
Lasers, chaos, and bow-ties
Laser technology has come a long way since the 1960s. The very earliest lasers, such as ruby and helium-neon devices, were formidable contraptions. They relied on dilute active media with discrete ene...
Deuterium ‘shocked’ into metallic state
Gilbert Collins and colleagues used the NOVA laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to carry out the experiments (Science 281 1178). The deuterium was placed in a small copp...
Controversy reigns over ‘dark matter’ claim
Alcock and co-workers have been searching for MACHOs – massive compact halo objects – with a technique known as gravitational lensing. In this the gravitational field of a heavy object act...
Nanotubes grow up
The technique uses an iron-silica catalyst created by coating a quartz plate with an iron-silica solution. Once the solution dries it cracks into a film 30-50 microns thick. After the substrate is hea...
Global warming confirmed from space
Previously satellite measurements have suggested that the atmosphere was cooling at 0.05 Kelvin per decade, while ground-based instruments showed an increase of 0.13 Kelvin per decade. However, as pol...
Unmanned plane tries transatlantic record
Each plane has a 3m wingspan and weighs 13.1 kg. During normal operations the craft will measure temperature, humidity and pressure over the ocean. At a cost of just $25000 each, the planes could dram...
