The L'Oréal Foundation and UNESCO has announced the five women scientists who will be honored as the 15th L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates. On March 28th, 2013, the five Laureates will be honored at an Awards ceremony in Paris and will receive US$100,000 in recognition of their accomplishments. 

The research of the 2013 Laureates ranges from contributing to better understanding of climate change to advancing research on neurodegenerative diseases and potentially uncovering new energy sources. 

The Laureates of the 2013 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards in Physical Sciences are:

If one beam travels a fixed length and another travels an extra distance or in some other slightly different way, the two light beams overlap and interfere when they meet up, creating an interference pattern that scientists inspect to obtain highly precise measurements.

It's football season so along with cheers and yelling you will hear a more dangerous sound; the sharp crack of helmet-to-helmet collisions. Hard collisions can lead to player concussions but the physics of how the impact of a helmet hit transfers to the brain is not yet well understood. 

A research team has created a simplified experimental model of the brain and skull inside a helmet during a helmet-to-helmet collision. The model illustrates how the fast vibrational motion of the hit translates into a sloshing motion of the brain inside the skull. 

A Gemini Legacy image has captured the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention. 

Tropical Storm Maria is moving away from Japan and strong wind shear is pushing its rainfall east of the storm's center, with no areas of heavy rain remaining in the tropical cyclone. The low-level center of the storm is now exposed and a wind shear greater than 30 knots (34.5 mph) continues to further weaken the storm.

Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today, from the odd, seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons that permeated the early universe some 14 billion years ago.

The RHIC physicists have been creating and studying this primordial quark-gluon plasma (QGP) for a while but the data they presented at the Quark Matter 2012 international conference from systematic studies varied the energy and types of colliding ions to create this new form of matter under a broad range of initial conditions, allowing the experimenters to unravel its properties.