Sudbury Neutrino Observatory opens
Neutrinos travel at the speed of light and only interact very weakly with matter, which makes them very difficult to detect. This is why neutrino detectors need to be large and built underground ̵...
Cloud seeding clears the air
In the last several years, my team at the University of Utah has developed a new seeding technique that can clear supercooled cloud and fog on a scale several times larger than a commercial airport. T...
Tackling current limits in superconductors
Superconductors lose their unique properties above a critical current density of about 105 A cm-2. The best candidates for high-current applications – silver sheathed tapes of the bismuth-lead-s...
Bureaucracy blocks R&D
The sum is substantial – domestic spending on basic research is about IR£2m each year; the country also receives IR£20m from the EU. “If the money is not released very soon, ther...
New ways to search the web
Search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista record a list of pages with keywords in them, but cannot interpret how relevant the information is on the page. For example the word ‘quantum’ r...
Students sign up for physics with finance
Financial institutions already employ physicists because they are uniquely familiar with the mathematical and conceptual thinking needed to understand financial risk in, for example, currencies and pr...
Astronomers see extra-solar planetary debris
Planets are thought to form from the debris surrounding young stars. As material rotates around the star, gravitational attraction causes the debris to clump together into planets. Gradually the plane...
New features on PhysicsWeb
Registration is free for members of the Institute of Physics and individual Physics World subscribers. A standalone subscription to PhysicsWeb costs £25. Free trial registrations are also availab...
German elections delay ESA shake-up
The meeting was due to be held in Belgium at the end of June. However, Yvan Ylieff, Belgium’s minister for scientific policy and organizer of the meeting, has announced that disagreements over t...
Industry funds ‘son’ of Internet
Three companies are investing in the project. Qwest Communications, one of the world’s fastest growing telecommunications companies, is donating 16000 miles of fibre optic cabling to the project...
