One of Britain’s leading climate change experts has thrown his weight behind the claim that global warming is being caused by human activity in a report published today by the Institute of Physics.
The report by Professor Alan Thorpe, who takes up his post as chief of the Natural Environmental Research Council next month, aims to tackle sceptics who doubt the models scientists use to predict future climate change.
Professor Thorpe outlines the scientific basis for
Say “nanotechnology” and people are likely to think of micro machines or zippy computer chips. But in a new twist, Rutgers scientists are using nanotechnology in chemical reactions that could provide hydrogen for tomorrow’s fuel-cell powered clean energy vehicles.
In a paper to be published April 20 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, describe how they make a finely textured surface of the metal iridium
The last outstanding hardware needed before arrival of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the European-built ISS supply ship due for launch in 2006, has been installed outside the International Space Station (ISS) during a 4 1/2 hour Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) on Monday 28 March.
The two ISS Expedition 10 crewmembers, Commander NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao and Flight Engineer Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov, who was the operational lead for the EVA, installed the l
In the March 25th 2005 issue of Science Magazine, the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) team of international astrophysicists, including UK astronomers from the University of Durham, report results of a first sensitive survey of the central part of our galaxy in very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays. Included among the new objects discovered are two ‘dark accelerators’ – mysterious objects that are emitting energetic particles, yet apparently have no optical or x-ray counterpart.
In orbit for three and a half years now, ESA’s smallest Earth Observation satellite is making a big contribution to science, a workshop heard this week. Proba applications range from studying land vegetation to water quality monitoring, assessing productivity of Italian vineyards, even helping hunt for meteorite impact craters.
ESA’s Proba microsatellite is about the same size and shape as a washing machine. It was launched on 22 October 2001 as a one-year technology de
Researchers from St. Petersburg have ascertained that formation of a child’s sex depends, among other things, on the geomagnetic field status at the time of conception.
Who will be born – a boy or a girl? The answer to this question that worries all parents is determined by a lot of conditions, including external ones. The scientists of the Central Scientific-Research Institute of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Ministry of Health Care of the Russian Federation (St. Petersburg)
Patterns of noise–normally considered flaws–in images of an ultracold cloud of potassium provide the first-ever visual evidence of correlated ultracold atoms, a potentially useful tool for many applications, according to physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Described in the March 21 online issue of Physical Review Letters,* the noise analysis method could, in principle, be use
Quasiparticles carry energy in condensed matter. In the world of quasiparticle physics, understanding when and how these energy carriers fail opens doors to another level of understanding, and can lead the way to many new and important theories. Scientists at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered the failure point for the quasiparticle construct, the standard model of condensed matter physics. This could have far-reaching implications, for example, in
Discovery could help scientists develop defenses against high-powered e-bombs and allow physicists to view fundamental building blocks of nature
Researchers at UCLA have for the first time been able to capture and digitize electrical signals at the rate of 1 trillion times per second, a discovery that eventually may help scientists develop defenses against high-powered microwave weapons attacks and allow physicists to peer into the fundamental building blocks of nature.
Pr
The University of Kent is collaborating with research teams from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London and University College London (UCL) to develop novel forms of degradable glass for a variety of medical applications, including new bone growth.
The Kent team, led by Bob Newport, Professor of Materials Physics and Director of the Functional Materials Group, has successfully steered a joint bid to the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), whic
Launch pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will soon see the Shuttle blasting off again for a new exciting mission in space. According to NASA’s current schedule, this will be between 15 May and 3 June (the precise date will be set once the flight readiness review process has been completed at the end of April).
The success of this mission will secure the future of the International Space Station (ISS), as the Shuttle is the only spacecraft capable of transporting new mod
ESO’s Telescopes Uncover Super Star Cluster in the Milky Way
Super star clusters are groups of hundreds of thousands of very young stars packed into an unbelievably small volume. They represent the most extreme environments in which stars and planets can form.
Until now, super star clusters were only known to exist very far away, mostly in pairs or groups of interacting galaxies. Now, however, a team of European astronomers have used ESO’s telescopes to uncover such a mon
Peculiar outbursts of X-rays coming from a black hole have provided evidence that it has a mass of about 10,000 Suns, which would place it in a possible new class of black holes. The timing and regularity of these outbursts, observed with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, make the object one of the best candidates yet for a so-called intermediate-mass black hole.
Scientists have strong evidence for the existence of stellar black holes that are about 10 times as massive as the Sun
In the quest to unravel the characteristics of the mysterious neutrino particle, millions of which pass through us undetected every day, scientists from several international universities have joined forces with UK research colleagues to build a unique engineering technology demonstrator at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Known as MICE [Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment] the experiment will prove one of the key requirements to produce intense beams of neutrinos at a dedicated
Physicists trace the “hopping” of single electrons in magnetic materials
How much energy does it take for an electron to hop from atom to atom, and how do the magnetic properties of the material influence the rate or ease of hopping? Answers to those questions could help explain why some materials, like those used in a computer hard drive, become conductors only in a magnetic field while they are very strong insulators otherwise. They might also help scientists learn how to use
In three spatial dimensions, it is a close relative of the quark-gluon plasma, the super-hot state of matter that hasn’t existed since the tiniest fraction of a second after the big bang that started the universe. When viewed in 10 dimensions, the minimum number prescribed by what physicists call “string theory,” it is a black hole.
No matter what you call it, though, that substance and others similar to it could be the most-perfect fluids in existence because they have ultr
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