Physics Today News Picks
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Khan documents confirms Chinese help in nuclear weapon research
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washingtonpost.com: In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Ürümqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, and a blueprint of how to build one say accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Khan is currently under house arrest.
The uranium transfer was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Chinese premier Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
US officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese—who den...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 20, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Russia restructures physics labsEmail this article to a colleague.
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Science: Four of Russia's most prominent physics labs are to be merged into a new national research center. The institutes, which have languished in the post-Soviet era, have cautiously welcomed the raised profile the merger will bring.
But a different reform aimed at separating basic and applied research at one of the institutes—the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Russia's premier lab for nuclear energy research--has researchers up in arms.
The merger, announced in a presidential decree last month, will combine the Institute for High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Protvino, 100 kilometers south of Moscow; the B. P. Kons...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 20, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
A light touch on liquid dropletsEmail this article to a colleague.
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Nature: With microfluidic devices gaining prominence for many applications in chemistry and biology, the hunt is on to find ways of accurately controlling the motion of liquid droplets. In Angewandte Chemie, Antoine Diguet et al. describe a method for using light to trap and move oil droplets floating on an aqueous solution.
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Photomanipulation of a droplet by the chromocapillary effect (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 20, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Fermilab pushes muon colliderEmail this article to a colleague.
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Nature News: Last week, US particle physicists staked their claim in a daring new venture to develop the next generation of accelerators by proposing the world's first muon collider.
The collider could overtake two more-mature concepts, each of which plan to smash together electrons and positrons that have been accelerated through long, straight tunnels.
But some physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, are concerned about the expense and feasibility of the linear colliders, and question whether they would push the boundaries of physics beyond what the Large Hadron Collide...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 19, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
A new way of ranking scientistsEmail this article to a colleague.
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APS Physics: Most metrics of a scientist’s impact in a field, like the h-index, rely primarily on the number of times his or her papers have been cited, and can miss the more subtle ways that knowledge and credit for this research spread among scientists.
Filippo Radicchi, Santo Fortunato, Benjamin Markines, and Alessandro Vespignani are instead proposing a way to rank scientists that reflects the diffusion of scientific credit in time.
Their method, based on an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank, takes into account several nontrivial effects such as the fact that being cited by an important author has more inf...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 19, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Temperature spikes in ancient AntarcticaEmail this article to a colleague.
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Physics Today: A new study of Antarctica's past climate reveals that temperatures during the warm periods between ice ages (interglacials) may have been higher than previously thought.
The findings, reported in Nature by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Open University and University of Bristol could help us understand more about rapid Antarctic climate changes.
The conclusions come the latest analysis of ice core records that suggests that Antarctic temperatures may have been up to 6°C warmer than the present day. (see image left. This Slice of ice core from Berkner Island, was dug up from a ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 19, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Spain to get molten salt solar power plantEmail this article to a colleague.
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CNET News: SolarReserve and Preneal have garnered the necessary permit to build a 50-megawatt thermal-solar plant in Spain that will use molten salt to store and release solar energy.
The project will be built in Alcazar de San Juan, a town about 110 miles south of Madrid. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 18, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
The US climate debate in the 18th CenturyEmail this article to a colleague.
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NYTimes.com: The controversy over the direction and temperature of the US climate has existed for hundred of years.
Benjamin Franklin understood climatic forcing factors better than anyone, surmising in a 1763 letter to Ezra Stiles that "cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker."
Franklin, later surmised (correctly) that a prevailing haze over parts of North America and northern Europe was associated with the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783, and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the colonies.
In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 18, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
World's largest radio telescope network goes liveEmail this article to a colleague.
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Space.com: The world's largest collection of radio telescopes is being tied together for 24 hours starting today to observe more than two hundred energetic galaxies known as quasars.
During those 24 hours, 35 telescopes on all seven continents will observe 243 distant quasars in an effort to improve the precision of the reference frame scientists use to measure positions in the sky. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 18, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Ericsson R&D pulls out of CoventryEmail this article to a colleague.
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The Register: Ericsson is pulling out of its R&D facility at Ansty Park, in the UK, jeopardizing 700 jobs in the process, despite only moving in six months ago. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 18, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Star likely to become a Type 1a supernovaEmail this article to a colleague.
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Physics Today: A white dwarf star called V445 in the constellation of Puppis, that is digesting its closest neighbor, is a prime candidate to explode as a Type Ia Supernova, ejecting a large quantity of matter into space.
V445 Puppis has been under a two-year observation by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The star was discovered by a amateur Japanese astronomer when it became visible as a nova in November 2000. It is the only nova appearing that has no hydrogen and provides the first evidence for an outburst on the surface of a white dwarf dominated by helium.
"This is critical, as we know that ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 17, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Holes that block lightEmail this article to a colleague.
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ScienceNOW: The way light moves, with its fixed speed and its ability to act like either a wave or a particle, often leads to some of the most curious paradoxes of physics. A new one has just been found: Make holes in a film of gold so thin that it's already semitransparent, and less light gets through. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 17, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Using noise to store dataEmail this article to a colleague.
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Science News: Studying with the radio on may not be the best way to remember what you've read. But scientists have now built a data storage device whose memory gets a boost from noise.
The device can store one bit of information, such as a 0 or a 1, only when surrounded by electronic noise, which is normally a problem in computer circuits.
"If you remove the noise, it doesn't store the bit at all," says Diego Grosz of the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, a coauthor of the study.
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One-bit stochastic resonance storage device (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 17, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Earth heading for 6 degrees of warmingEmail this article to a colleague.
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BBC News: Average temperatures across the world are on course to rise by up to 6°C without urgent action to curb CO2 emissions, according a new analysis.
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Global temperatures will rise 6C by end of century, say scientists The Guardian (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 17, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Freeing a Mars rover from a sand trapEmail this article to a colleague.
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NPR: NASA has announced a plan to extricate its rover Spirit, which has been stuck in a Martian sand trap since April.
The space agency will begin transmitting commands to the exploration robot today. Based on tests conducted on Earth this spring that simulated conditions at the Martian site, researchers do not expect the effort to be quick or easy. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 16, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Israelis building a cheap microwave pain rayEmail this article to a colleague.
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Wired.com: The US military spent tens of millions of dollars and years of work developing a microwave “pain beam,” but a combination of technical difficulties and political concerns kept the Pentagon from fielding the thing.
Now, an Israeli team says they’re working on their own portable version. And it’ll cost just $250,000. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 16, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Dirac electrons broken to piecesEmail this article to a colleague.
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Nature: The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a fascinating form of collective electronic behavior.
It arises when electrons in a strong magnetic field—applied at a right angle to the plane in which the electrons flow—act together to behave like particles with a charge that is a fraction of an electron's charge.
Its observation requires the use of two-dimensional systems virtually free of disorder. This is why, since its discovery by Daniel Tsui and Horst Störmer in 1982—for which they won the 1998 Nobel Physics prize—the effect has been studied in ultrapure semiconductor heterostructures...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 16, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Greenland ice sheet is melting fastEmail this article to a colleague.
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Times Online: Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, according to the most detailed observations to date.
Until now scientists had been unable to establish whether the loss of the ice sheet had speeded up significantly since the 1990s.
Using two independent measurement techniques, the latest study reveals that the melting accelerated rapidly over the period 2000-2008.
If the acceleration of melting continues at the same rate, the sea level from Greeland’s ice alone would rise by 40cm by the end of the century.
If the melting continues at a steady pace—the best-case scenario according to M...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 16, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Labeling nuclear waste for the futureEmail this article to a colleague.
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Slate Magazine: Communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to unfathomably remote descendants may seem like a topic best left to third-drink philosophers in dorm rooms.
It's actually been left to the US Department of Energy.
According to government guidelines, DoE must plan for the continuing safety of nuclear waste sites over the next 10 millenniums.
So in 1991, the department (through Sandia National Laboratories) hired 13 linguists, scientists, and anthropologists at a cost of about $1 million to devise a conceptual plan for a 10,000-year marker system.
The summary report, dryly titled "Expert Judgment on Markers...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 16, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Europe's first medical heavy-ion machineEmail this article to a colleague.
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Backreaction: The Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center (HIT)—the first medical heavy-ion machine in Europe—has opened.
Close to the GSI facility near Darmstadt, the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center is a dedicated heavy-ion accelerator for deployment in radiotherapy to treat tumors.
Treatment center at the focus of the HIT Gantry. Credit: HIT
Physicist Stefan Scherer briefly takes a look at this new facility and the physics behind it. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 13, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Mount Wilson Observatory wildfire still not out, but containedEmail this article to a colleague.
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latimes.com: The soil around Mount Wilson Observatory still smolders, burning what root systems remain after the devastating wildfire was declared contained weeks ago. Fire crews are monitoring the area.
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Fire news from Mt. Wilson Observatory (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 13, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Water evidence seen in lunar impact plumeEmail this article to a colleague.
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Physics Today: The Moon is wetter than previously believed, say NASA scientists Friday, reporting the results of the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) impact probe, that slammed into lunar polar craters a month ago.
"There's water, and it is not just a little water, but significant amounts," says NASA's Anthony Colaprete, chief science investigator for the LCROSS in a press conference earlier today.
The LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket was used to create a plume on the 9 October by smashing into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole.
The resulting impact crea...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 13, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Lithium key for exoplanet searchEmail this article to a colleague.
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BBC News: Astronomers may have found a way to identify those Sun-like stars most likely to harbour orbiting planets.
A survey of stars known to possess planets shows the vast majority to be severely depleted in lithium.
To date, scientists have detected just over 420 worlds circling other stars using a range of techniques.
Garik Israelian and colleagues tell the journal Nature that future planet hunts could be narrowed by going after stars with particular compositions. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 13, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Were dinosaurs warm-blooded and nimble?Email this article to a colleague.
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guardian.co.uk: Tyrannosaurus rex was an athletic, warm-blooded animal that jogged rather than lumbered around its territory, according to a new study.
Researchers led by Herman Pontzer at Washington University in St Louis examined the anatomical details of 14 dinosaurs of different sizes to work out how much energy the animals might have needed to move around.
He found that, for dinosaurs weighing from a few kilograms to tons, the power their muscles needed was far too high for the animals to have been cold-blooded.
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Biomechanics of running indicates endothermy in bipedal dinosaurs (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 12, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Prototype solar sail to sailEmail this article to a colleague.
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NYTimes.com: About a year from now, if all goes well, a box called LightSail-1, about the size of a loaf of bread, will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth.
There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails (see left image for an artist's rendition of LightSail-1 by Rick Sternbach. Credit: Planetary Society) as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.
LightSail-1 will sail only a few hours and gain a few miles in altitude.
But those hours will mark a milestone in the quest to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight the...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 12, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
The strength of soft glassEmail this article to a colleague.
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Nature: The mechanisms that govern the rate at which glasses soften on heating have long been a mystery. The finding that colloids can mimic the full range of glass-softening behaviors offers a fresh take on the problem.
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Soft colloids make strong glasses (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 12, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Space debris getting out of control, says officialEmail this article to a colleague.
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Space.com: The amount of junk floating in space is getting out of hand and the US must step up its effort to control orbital trash, say experts.
The chief of US Strategic Command said Wednesday that America needs better tools to monitor the orbital debris that's up there and plan to avoid collisions with valuable satellites.
"We are decades behind where we should be, in my view," said Air Force General Kevin P. Chilton in a speech at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
Chilton called for more personnel and more sensors and equipment to study and combat the threat. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Rift grows between US, poor nations over climate talksEmail this article to a colleague.
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NPR: As the world prepares for crucial climate-change talks in Copenhagen next month, there is a growing rift between the US and some of the world's poorest nations. The gap grew wider this past week, at the final official pre-Copenhagen talks in Barcelona. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Space debris getting uncontrollable, says officialEmail this article to a colleague.
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Space.com: The amount of junk floating in space is getting out of hand and the US must step up its effort to control orbital trash, say experts.
The chief of US Strategic Command said Wednesday that America needs better tools to monitor the orbital debris that's up there and plan to avoid collisions with valuable satellites.
"We are decades behind where we should be, in my view," said Air Force General Kevin P. Chilton in a speech at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
Chilton called for more personnel and more sensors and equipment to study and combat the threat. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Climate talks rift grows between US, poor nationsEmail this article to a colleague.
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NPR: As the world prepares for crucial climate-change talks in Copenhagen next month, there is a growing rift between the US and some of the world's poorest nations. The gap grew wider this past week, at the final official pre-Copenhagen talks in Barcelona. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Family is the number one reason for women leaving academiaEmail this article to a colleague.
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Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"
For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.
In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.
"So it’s increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.
Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Atom imaged in ultracold gasEmail this article to a colleague.
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Photonics.com: A high-resolution microscope has been developed to image individual atoms in an ultracold quantum gas, marking the first time scientists have detected single atoms in a crystalline structure made solely of light, called a Bose Hubbard optical lattice.
Physicists at Harvard University created the microscope as part of efforts to use ultracold quantum gases to understand and develop novel quantum materials. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 11, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
The X prize for building a better light bulbEmail this article to a colleague.
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NPR: The US Department of Energy is offering $10 million to the first individual or company to develop an energy-efficient LED replacement for the standard 60-watt incandescent bulb.
DOE lighting program manager James Brodrick discusses the L Prize with NPR, and what makes a better bulb. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 10, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Cheaper desalinationEmail this article to a colleague.
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The Economist: There is a lot of water on Earth, but more than 97% of it is salty and over half of the remainder is frozen at the poles or in glaciers.
Meanwhile, around a fifth of the world’s population suffers from a shortage of drinking water and that fraction is expected to grow.
One answer is desalination—but it is an expensive answer because it requires a lot of energy.
Now, though, a pair of Canadian engineers through a company called Saltworks Technologies, have come up with an ingenious way of using the heat of the sun to drive the process. Such heat, in many places that have a shortage of fresh ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 10, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan?Email this article to a colleague.
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he New Yorker: Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country.
Last month ten gunmen penetrated the Pakistan's Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed.
The success of this latest attacks raises an obvious question says the New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh: Are the bombs safe? (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 10, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
The X prize for building a better lightbulbEmail this article to a colleague.
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NPR: The US Department of Energy is offering $10 million to the first individual or company to develop an energy-efficient LED replacement for the standard 60-watt incandescent bulb.
DOE lighting program manager James Brodrick discusses the L Prize with NPR, and what makes a better bulb. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 10, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Experts criticize nanoparticle studyEmail this article to a colleague.
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ScienceNOW: A new study has found that nanoscale materials, used in everything from medical imaging to cancer treatment, can damage genetic material in our bodies, feeding public fears.
But this particular study has little relevance to human exposure risks, experts say, and it is deeply flawed in other ways. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 10, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Turning a cell phone into a microscopeEmail this article to a colleague.
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NYTimes.com: Microscopes are invaluable tools to identify blood and other cells when screening for diseases like anemia, tuberculosis, and malaria. But they are also bulky and expensive.
Now an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cell phones to substitute for microscopes. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 9, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Plumes on Saturn's moonEmail this article to a colleague.
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USA Today: Saturn's geyser-spewing moon, Enceladus—visited by the international Cassini spacecraft on its closest flyby this week—presents planetary scientists with a geophysical locked-room mystery.
How does something buried inside an ice ball only 500 kilometers wide provide the pop to propel a plume 965 kilometers out of the moon's south pole?
"The biggest puzzle with Enceladus is where is the heat source," says Cassini scientist Linda Spilker of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. "This tiny moon 'should' be frozen over like the others orbiting Saturn." (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 9, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Turning a cellphone into a microscopeEmail this article to a colleague.
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NYTimes.com: Microscopes are invaluable tools to identify blood and other cells when screening for diseases like anemia, tuberculosis, and malaria. But they are also bulky and expensive.
Now an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 9, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
LHC tests hint that collider will run within two weeksEmail this article to a colleague.
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Physics Today: Tests on parts of the Large Hadron Collider over the weekend were fairly successful suggest CERN documents.
Particles up to 450 GeV were injected into four sectors of the storage ring (sector 23, 78, 67 and 56).
For the first time—at 8pm local time on Saturday—the CMS detector observed beam 'splash' in the LHC, a major milestone for the experiment (see yellow indicators in image below).
Image credit: CERN
These injection tests are the final phase before the main test on 20 November in which particles will transverse across the entire ring. Actual collisions between two opposing beams should ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 9, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Iran may have tested advanced warhead explosives, says IAEA reportEmail this article to a colleague.
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The Guardian: The International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, says the Guardian.
The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and the UK, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design.
A two-point implosion device, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than first-generation warheads....
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 6, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Prosthetics do not give sprinters unfair advantageEmail this article to a colleague.
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guardian.co.uk: Prosthetics worn by disabled sprinters confer no speed advantage, scientists have found. If anything, they may reduce the top speed a runner can achieve.
The research supports the case made by the South African Paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who uses flexible carbon-fiber blades in races.
Pistorius has long argued that he should be allowed to compete alongside able-bodied athletes in races, but athletics authorities banned him from doing so in last year's Olympic games, claiming that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes.
But the new study by Alena Grabowski at the Massac...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 6, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Iran may have tested advanced warhead explosives says IAEA reportEmail this article to a colleague.
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The Guardian: The International Atomic Energy Agency has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, says the Guardian.
The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and the UK, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the IAEA, Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design.
A two-point implosion device, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than first generation warheads....
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 6, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Why so few East German Max Planck directors?Email this article to a colleague.
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Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.
But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.
Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.
For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift wh...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 6, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Large Hadron Collider scuttled by baguetteEmail this article to a colleague.
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The Register: A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.
According to scientists at the project, had the LHC been operational—it is scheduled to recommence beaming later this month—the snag would have caused it to fail safe and shut down automatically.
This would put the mighty machine out of action for a few days while it was restarted, but there would be no repeat of the catastrophic ...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 6, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
How did pre-Columbian societies extract gold?Email this article to a colleague.
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ScienceNOW: When Spanish conquistadors seized the Inca emperor Atawalpa in 1532, they demanded an enormous ransom of silver and gold that took weeks to collect.
Such an enormous stash suggests that the Andean people knew sophisticated metallurgy, but there has been little evidence to support this.
Now a team of geologists and archaeologists have found clues that may indicate that these indigenous people refined gold with mercury amalgamation, an important metallurgical technique that is still in use today. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 5, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
How to keep planes from colliding with lasersEmail this article to a colleague.
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Wired.com: Beaming high-powered lasers into the sky allows scientists to study changing weather patterns, pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere and even gravity on the Moon. But if one of those helpful lasers happens to cross paths with an airplane, it can temporarily blind or distract the pilot and potentially cause a crash.
The current method to avoid plane-laser collisions is decidedly low-tech: Federal Aviation Administration regulations require anyone who’s sending a laser up into the atmosphere to employ multiple human observers, called “spotters,” to watch for planes flying within 25 degrees of the laser beam...
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 5, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
How did precolumbian societies extract gold?Email this article to a colleague.
Save this article to My Clippings.
Discuss or comment on this article.
ScienceNOW: When Spanish conquistadors seized the Inca emperor Atawalpa in 1532, they demanded an enormous ransom of silver and gold that took weeks to collect.
Such an enormous stash suggests that the Andean people knew sophisticated metallurgy, but there has been little evidence to support this.
Now a team of geologists and archaeologists have found clues that may indicate that these indigenous people refined gold with mercury amalgamation, an important metallurgical technique that is still in use today. (Source: Physics Today News Picks)
Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 5, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
Is there a future for JDEM?Email this article to a colleague.
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Nature News: The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM)—a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the Universe's expansion—is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE), and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency (ESA).
In addition, scientists working on the JDEM designs have not presented a unified front, owing to disagreements over the best observational method to use at a time when an influential astrophysics panel is about to prioritize the next decade's best and most organized missions.
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Source: Physics Today News Picks - November 5, 2009 Category: Physics Authors: Physics Today Source Type: news
