Solving the plutonium problem
Russia and the US each have 50 tons of weapons-grade plutonium to dispose of by either converting it into fuel, or mixing it in with radioactive waste. At the same time, France and the UK separate 20 ...
PEP-II shapes up
PEP-II consists of two independent storage rings in the tunnel that housed the original PEP collider. The high-energy ring, which stores a 9 GeV electron beam, is an upgrade of the existing PEP collid...
American hesitation puts ITER in limbo
The Department of Energy (DOE), which oversees fusion research in the US, wanted to sign the extension. However, the Republican-controlled Congress insisted that the US should not sign it without R...
Strain doubles superconductor temperatures
Their technique works by growing single crystal films of the superconducting compound lanthanum-strontium-copper-oxide (La1.9Sr0.1CuO4) on top of a crystal with a smaller lattice spacing. Because the ...
New clues to the left-handed origins of life
Fred Hoyle was the first to suggest that organic molecules developed in outer space and then fell to the earth, but it was not until the discovery of large quantities of left-handed amino acids in a m...
UK ends ‘free’ Internet access
The charges are designed to help fund the soaring costs of international Internet access from the UK. Over the past four years access costs have risen from £1 million ($1.7 m) to £7 million ...
Antarctic glaciers feel the heat
Rignot used radar data taken between 1992 and 1996 by two European satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, to generate interference patterns that are sensitive to small vertical movements. These patterns provide...
The myth of high-tech job creation
The report suggests that governments should move more university researchers onto short-term contracts to encourage mobility between academia and industry. It also recommends that scientists should re...
‘Idle’ machines look for ET
In the past similar approaches have been used to crack encryption codes or calculate the largest prime number, but this is the first time such a scheme has been used for analysing raw scientific data....
The shape of sonoluminescence
Sonoluminescence occurs because sound waves cause a bubble to expand and then collapse in a liquid. The bubble first expands to almost 10 times its original dimensions, and then collapses at supersoni...
