Physics

Refurbished Z-Machine Goes Back Online

Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine, the world’s largest producer of X-rays, shook the ground for several hundred yards in every direction for the first time since July 2006, when the 22-year-old facility was gutted to undergo a complete refurbishment ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 23 2007 - 5:43pm

Time To Re-Think Newton's Theory Of Gravitation? Galaxy Cluster Models Cast Doubt On Dark Matter

For almost 75 years, astronomers have believed that the Universe has a large amount of unseen or ‘dark’ matter, thought to make up about five-sixths of the matter in the cosmos. With the conventional theory of gravitation, based on Newton’s ideas and refin ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 31 2007 - 11:11am

Refining The Metric System For More Accuracy

The running joke in science has always been that the metric system was invented by the French to combat English predominance culturally- and they got the measurement wrong. Still, it caught on (though the French calendar didn't) and that International ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 1 2007 - 11:27am

Electrons In Some Compounds 'Gain Weight' At Cold Temperatures

Rutgers University physicists have performed computer simulations that show how electrons become one thousand times more massive in certain metal compounds when cooled to temperatures near absolute zero – the point where all motion ceases. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 1 2007 - 4:01pm

'Beam Of Light' Is Ray Of Hope For Israeli-Jordanian Cooperation

An Israeli-Jordanian-U.S. cooperative project aimed at measuring air quality in the area between the neighboring southern cities of Aqaba in Jordan and Eilat in Israel has been launched by scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with sc ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 8 2007 - 10:20am

World's Smallest Double-Slit Experiment

The big world of classical physics mostly seems sensible: waves are waves and particles are particles, and the moon rises whether anyone watches or not. The tiny quantum world is different: particles are waves (and vice versa), and quantum systems remain i ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 10 2007 - 1:23am

'Stealth' Antenna Made Of Gas, Impervious To Jamming

A new antenna made of plasma (a gas heated to the point that the electrons are ripped free of atoms and molecules) works just like conventional metal antennas, except that it vanishes when you turn it off. That's important on the battlefield and in ot ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 12 2007 - 2:58pm

Nanoscience: Weak Force, Strong Effect

The van der Waals force, a weak attractive force, is solely responsible for binding certain organic molecules to metallic surfaces. In a model for organic devices, it is this force alone that binds an organic film to a metallic substrate. This data, recent ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 24 2007 - 8:30am

Cold Dark Matter Cosmology Puzzle Solved

Researchers using supercomputer simulations have exposed a very violent and critical relationship between interstellar gas and dark matter when galaxies are born – one that has been largely ignored by the current model of how the universe evolved. ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 29 2007 - 5:32pm

Quest: Solving The Mystery Source Of Earth's Cosmic Rays

Faint, fleeting blue flashes of radiation emitted by particles that travel faster than the speed of light through the atmosphere may help scientists solve one of the oldest mysteries in astrophysics. For nearly a century, scientists have wondered about the ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 3 2007 - 7:33pm