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...
Scientists hail SOHO
“This is the best news I’ve heard since we lost contact with SOHO” says Roger Bonnet, ESA’s director of science. “We should just hope that the damage sustained by SOHO...
Cosmic rays: the puzzles continue
Speculation on the origin of high energy cosmic rays has existed for some time. The best candidates are massive supernova explosions or the decay of superheavy particles near the beginning of the univ...
Product testing to destruction
Most automobile vibration testing is sinusoidal in nature, in which a regular pattern of rapid, slow and zero vibrations vary in a predictable pattern to mimic driving conditions. Hu’s random vi...
European radio astronomers silence satellites
Signals produced by the satellites are over a 100 times stronger than the radio sources studied by astronomers. Under the new agreement, European radio astronomers will get 24 hours of ‘unpollut...
