Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
Wireless quantum encryption
The technique is based on characteristics of individual photons that are generated randomly between the sender and the receiver. Although researchers have already transmitted quantum encryption keys t...
PhD theses to go online
The DFG has been experimenting with different ways of digitizing postgraduate dissertations for some time. These documents are usually one of the hardest sets of scientific information to access becau...
Russia sells research time
In the deal NASA gains Russia’s research time during the first four to five years of the space station’s construction, the rights to store experiments onboard a Russian-built module and th...
India and Pakistan lied about nuclear tests
These latest results, according to Barker et al., indicate “high confidence” that the network being set up to monitor the CTBT can indeed verify small nuclear explosions. Concerns over the...
Positrons found in quasar jets
Quasar jets are streams of plasma that travel at near the speed of light from supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies. The jets appear at radio wavelengths, but can also be detected in the ...
Higgs search loses a fortnight
With a collision energy of 189 GeV, LEP is currently the world’s highest energy electron-positron collider. It was originally due to be shut down at the end of this year, but physicists working ...
Secret files reveal plan to kidnap Bohr
Bohr had escaped from German-occupied Denmark in September 1943 and crossed the Atlantic to work with British and American physicists on the Manhattan atomic-bomb project at Los Alamos. However, he re...
International projects face flak in Congress
Sensenbrenner has long campaigned against ITER, an international collaboration between fusion labs in Europe, Japan, Russia and the US. He claims that ITER has soaked up valuable funds that could be u...
Superconductivity debate gets ugly
However,it is the last paragraph that makes the paper unique: “The tragedy of beautiful theories, ” write Chakraverty et al., “is that they are often destroyed by ugly facts. One per...
