Physics

When Is A Metal Not A Metal?

When is a Metal not a metal?  At high pressure, of course! ...

Article - Robert H Olley - Sep 19 2010 - 3:38pm

Ions Coldly Go Where No NIST Trap Has Gone Before

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new ion trap that enables ions to go through an intersection while keeping their cool. Ten million times cooler than in prior similar trips, in fact. The demonstrat ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 8 2009 - 3:17pm

Type Ia Supernovae Get A Helium Star Hypothesis

A team of astronomers, led by Dr. Bo Wang from the Yunnan Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have developed a new model which explains the formation of the most youthful type Ia supernovae. In a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal ...

Article - News Staff - May 15 2009 - 1:20pm

A Theory of Time Part 5: Some Thoughts on Velocity

Part 1, which begins our examination of the question 'what is time?' can be viewed here. Part 2 Some travels through time can be viewed  here. Part 3 discussing language, sequence and order, can be viewed  here. Part 4 a brief discussion of clock ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Apr 19 2009 - 12:07pm

We Can Put A Man On The Moon, But We’re Still Figuring Out How Birds Fly

Spring has officially arrived. I don’t need the budding trees or the warmer temperatures to tell me – I can tell just by the chatter of birds that has returned, kicking into high gear as soon as the sky begins to lighten each morning. We have a large tree ...

Article - Kimberly Crandell - Apr 13 2009 - 10:21pm

Controlled Polarization Breakthrough Makes Lasers Cool Again

Applied scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) in collaboration with researchers from Hamamatsu Photonics in Hamamatsu City, Japan, have demonstrated, for the first time, lasers in which the direction of oscillation of ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 13 2009 - 12:14am

Murray Gell-Mann, irascible as ever

Discover has an interview with genius physicist Murray Gell-Mann. Gell-Mann on Heisenberg: But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank. On Feynman: [He] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he ...

Blog Post - Michael White - Apr 14 2009 - 12:15pm

A Theory of Time Part 6: Inertia, Information and The Arrow of Time

Part 1, which begins our examination of the question 'what is time?' can be viewed here. Part 2 Some travels through time can be viewed  here. Part 3 discussing language, sequence and order, can be viewed  here. Part 4 a brief discussion of clock ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Apr 15 2009 - 5:50pm

A Fascinating New Higgs Boson Search By The DZERO Experiment

Reporting on scientific results to a broad audience is difficult, in my opinion, not so much because of the need to explain things in a simple way-which is easy and fun, once you master the matter- as for the self-discipline you are forced to stick to. ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 20 2009 - 1:37pm

Dark Matter: A Critical Assessment Of Recent Cosmic-Ray Signals

I participated with pleasure last month to a four-day conference devoted to neutrino telescopes, NEUTEL 2009, in Venice. Venice is my home town, and walking in the morning to the conference venue in Palazzo Franchetti (see left), a big and beautiful palac ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Apr 17 2009 - 4:57pm