Nanotubes for the Mass Market
Carbon nanotubes – which can be thought of as a rolled-up graphite sheet – were discovered in 1991. One way to produce large quantities of nanotubes is to place two water-cooled carbon ele...
Computer heal thyself
Researchers are investigating new ways to make computer chips in an effort to increase processing speed. It is likely that these new methods, such as chemical fabrication and assembly, will produce la...
Hydrogen exonerated in Hindenburg crash
William Van Vorst of the University of California at Los Angles and Addison Bain, an independent consultant, have gathered evidence that hydrogen could not have caused the explosion. Film footage and ...
Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight
The Doomsday Clock was set up in 1947 by atomic scientists concerned at the growing nuclear tensions between the US and Soviet Union. Initially the clock read seven minutes to midnight, and moved to t...
Crosswords and cross words on the Internet
The crossword puzzle was created using a software package developed by Lewis. The instructor simply types the clues and their answers into the program, which then creates the crossword grid. Although ...
Hackers attack Stanford accelerator
The hacker or hackers managed to gain password access to SLAC by intercepting the username and password of a registered user accessing data inside SLAC’s firewall. The random behaviour of the ha...
Sloan Survey sees first light
The 2.5 m Sloan telescope is based at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The telescope has an unusually wide field of view and one of the most advanced digital cameras ever built. The camera cons...
Deep Impact may be more than a movie
The researchers constructed a mathematical representation of the irregularly spaced near Earth asteroid Castalia for their calculations. They assumed it would be made of solid rock, a pair of solid ro...
South Africa approves new telescope
Astronomers involved with the project hope to use a lightweight multi-segment design similar to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas, which cost only about 20 per cent of what it would cost to bu...
Super-Kamiokande finds neutrino mass
Neutrinos come in three types – electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos – and only interact very weakly with matter, which makes them extremely difficult to detect. Neutrino d...
