New leaders for SLAC and ESO
Dorfan was born in South Africa and received his first degree from the University of Cape Town, and his doctorate from the University of California at Irvine in 1976. He has spent most of his career a...
Women sue Lawrence Livermore over equal opportunities
One of the women, Mary Singleton, has been complaining about the inequality for 20 years and says that in 1986 the lab’s management board admitted that female staff were discriminated against. H...
Quantum engineering moves on
One of the central questions is how to manipulate or “engineer” these entangled states in real physical systems. Indeed, very few physical systems satisfy the stringent requirements that m...
Taking a closer look at “big G”
The gravitational constant was first measured by Lord Cavendish in 1798, who used a torsion-balance to measure the force between a pair of lead spheres. Cavendish measured G to be 6.754 x 10-11 metres...
Science chooses accelerating universe as “Breakthrough of the Year”
Astronomers have known for decades that the universe is expanding, based on measurements of the “red shift” of light emitted by galaxies. According to the standard cosmological model, ther...
Physics loses out in UK budget
All of the other research councils will get increases of at least 3%, with the Medical Research Council receiving a rise of 6.8%. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) will ge...
Thomson scattering goes relativistic
Donald Umstadter and co-workers used a neodymium-glass laser to illuminate helium gas in a vacuum chamber. The team were able to focus 4 trillion watts of power on the gas. The electric field of the l...
Chaos and the arms race
In the early 1960s Lloyd Richardson had developed a dynamic model to foresee the outbreak of war. He believed that there were three processes that a nation responds to: the external threat (the enemy)...
Scientists wobble over Earth’s tilt
Geologists have known for some time that ice sheets existed at the equator between 2, 400 and 2, 200 million years ago and then again between 820 and 550 million years ago. Their favourite theory to e...
The force of acoustics
“The idea of using white noise to mimic zero-point fluctuations is clever, ” said Steve Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. “The fundamentals are quite different f...
