Physics Today: A space shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was given the go ahead on Friday, in a desperate attempt to keep NASA's flagship space-based instrument up and running. An official announcement by NASA administrator Michael Griffin is expected later today.
Azom.com: Plasma physicists at the Universities of Texas and Michigan have photographed speedy plasma waves, known as Langmuir waves, for the first time, using a specially designed holographic-strobe camera. The waves are the fastest matter waves ever photographed, clocking in at about 99.997% of the speed of light. The waves are generated in the wake of an ultra-intense laser pulse, and give rise to enormous electric fields, reaching voltages higher than 100 billion electron volts/meter (GeV/m). The waves' electric fields can be used to accelerate electrons so strongly that they may lead to ultra-compact, tabletop versions of a high-energy particle accelerators that could be a thousand times smaller that devices which currently exists only in large-scale facilities, which are typically miles long.
Financial Times: Large companies are pouring money into research and development at an unprecedented rate, in response to growing global competition. The international R&D Scoreboard, published on Monday, shows a 7 per cent increase in spending by the world’s top 1,250 companies.
The Independent: Climate change has been made the world's biggest priority, with the publication of a stark report showing that the planet faces catastrophe unless urgent measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The New York Times: Though experts agree the world faces a daunting challenge in finding nonpolluting energy sources, research into new technology has declined.
China.org: A training center for nuclear fusion research has been established at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, to boost expertise in the nuclear fusion field.
ScienceNow: Researchers looking for better ways to make and store hydrogen have accidentally discovered an entirely new kind of ice. Made of molecular oxygen and hydrogen, the highly energetic and as-yet-unnamed compound currently exists only under rarefied laboratory conditions. It is different from the 17 known forms of ice, but researchers think its discovery could advance understanding of the nature of water under extreme conditions, such as in the interior of planets and even inside nuclear reactors. It also might help to spawn new rocket fuels.
The Independent: The world's target for stopping global warming should be based on the point at which the melting of the great Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible, says the Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King.
The Register:
Intel is to close its UK research centre in Cambridge, The Register understands, just three and a half years after it was first opened. The move is part of the streamlining of the company outlined by CEO Paul Otellini earlier this year.
Science: Cassini team members at the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences meeting, held here from 8 to 13 October, reported the first detection of a change on the surface of Titan since Cassini's arrival, and it appears to be powered from within.
Reuters: Iran has injected gas into a new network of centrifuges, Iran's student news agency ISNA reported on Friday, referring to part of an atomic programme the West fears is aimed at making bombs.
San Francisco Chronicle: A giant underwater landslide that gouged the bottom of Lake Tahoe thousands of years ago sent a tsunami coursing across the lake and left huge ripples of rock that remain today, geologists have discovered.
BBC: US space agency Nasa has launched two spacecraft that are expected to make the first 3D movies of the Sun.
ScienceNow: A veritable who's who of climate scientists has weighed in on an important question before the Supreme Court: whether the U.S. government should regulate carbon emissions from new cars. Last month, a group of climate scientists told the Supreme Court that a 2003 decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not to regulate greenhouse gases from cars was based on a misreading of the scientific literature. Yesterday, eight climatologists took EPA's side in the case, writing that there is "insufficient evidence that carbon dioxide emissions will endanger public health or welfare."
The New York Times: In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.
Nature: Geoff Brumfiel asks in this week's Nature whether US plans to limit North Korea's exporting opportunities of its nuclear technology will work. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been meeting leaders from neighboring countries to discuss ways to detect and intercept illicit nuclear stocks but some proliferation experts doubt that the screening regime is practical or even possible. A particular concern is that North Korea might smuggle nuclear material to other states or terrorist groups, says Michael Burns, principal deputy for threat reduction at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. If terrorists do get hold of a nuclear bomb says Michael May and Jay Davis in a commentary write in the same issue, it will be crucial to know where the terrorists got their material. In that regard, they propose that the international community should consider expanding the IAEA existing database of nuclear explosives to develop the field of nuclear forensics. "Establishing the data bank proposed here would greatly reduce the time between this most terrible of events and the ability to respond to it," says Davis and May.
Philadelphia Enquirer: Princeton geoscientist calls Mexican meteor idea flat-out wrong.
The New York Times: Two satellites are scheduled to lift off on Wednesday night on a $550 million mission to observe the Sun in three dimensions.
Wired: They run out of juice – or burst into flames – at exactly the wrong time. Can't anyone make a battery that doesn't suck?
ScienceNow: Finding Egyptian tombs is a tricky business that often requires a fair amount of luck. Now geologists have found a way to take some of the chance out of the equation.
ABC News: New analysis suggests experiments on Viking landers were flawed
Space.com: The Sun had sisters when it was born, according to new research, hundreds to thousands of them.
And at least one was a supernova, providing further support for the idea that there could be lots of planets around other stars since our solar system emerged in such an explosive environment.
The Register: Researchers working at the FermiLab particle accelerator in the US have discovered two new kinds of particle, exotic relatives of the common-or-garden proton and neutron.
Herald Sun: Thousands of scientists are queuing to use Melbourne's synchrotron when it opens for business next year.
The New York Times: Eager for precision in a field notorious for ambiguity and frustration, curators at top museums in Europe and the United States have long reached for the instruments of nuclear science to hit treasures of art with invisible rays. The resulting clues have helped answer vexing questions of provenance, age and authenticity.
Salon.com: Burned by 2004, I've been doing my best this time around to avoid the echo chamber of lefty blogs telling me what I want to hear about the possibility of Democrats taking control of Congress. But when the Wall Street Journal starts predicting a blowout, the siren song gets hard to resist.
Environmental News Network: The world -- especially the Western United States, the Mediterranean region and Brazil -- will likely suffer more extended droughts, heavy rainfalls and longer heat waves over the next century because of global warming, a new study forecasts.
BBC: A Rhodes scholarship-type scheme will be set up to attract the world's best scientists to the UK, the government is set to announce.
MSNBC: Lunar lander takes a tumble; Space Elevator Games go into overtime
Arms Control Today: On Oct. 9, North Korea announced that it had carried out an underground nuclear test. In subsequent days, the apparent low yield of the device and initial lack of reports of detection of radioactivity from the test raised questions about whether North Korea had actually tested a nuclear device or if a test had failed.
Science: European researchers have compiled a wish list of 35 large-scale projects that they would love to see built over the next 2 decades.
Los Angeles Times: Shares of defense services contractor Science Applications International Corp. added more than 21 percent Friday in the company's trading debut.
San Francisco Chronicle: Changes seasonal, scientists expect long-term shrinking.
Opinion: Nature:
In less than two-and-a-half years, the next president of the United States will take the oath of office and deliver his or her inaugural address. In early 2009, the president and a small group of sleep-deprived aides will submit a multi-trillion-dollar budget, nominate or appoint senior advisers and members of the cabinet, and establish the administration's initial policy priorities. As a result of my eight years as a science and technology policy adviser to President Clinton, I am convinced that the scientific and technical community should begin to plan now for this transition.
BBC: The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online.
The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable.
People's Daily Online: Analyzing the highest resolution radar-signal images ever made on the moon, planetary astronomers on Wednesday excluded the possibility of ice existing in craters at the lunar south pole.
The New York Times: In 1979, Shing-Tung Yau, then a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, was visiting China and asked the authorities for permission to visit his birthplace, Shantou, a mountain town in Guangdong Province.
ScienceNow: Technicians at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the island of Hawaii are in the process of restoring operations to the station's twin giant telescopes, which were disrupted by the magnitude-6.7 earthquake and aftershocks that hit the west coast of the island Sunday morning. The earthquake was the largest in Hawaii in 20 years and caused power and communication failures across the state but caused no deaths or serious injuries.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: In the rarefied world of supercomputing, a petaflop is the four-minute mile of number crunching - the kind of raw computational power needed to predict detailed global climate changes, simulate nuclear chain reactions or model the birth of the cosmo.
Reuters: A seemingly violent collision of two galaxies is in fact a fertile marriage that has birthed billions of new stars, and an image released on Tuesday gives astronomers their best view yet.
BBC: There is an "urgent need" to help developing countries adapt to impacts of climate change, UK Climate Change Minister Ian Pearson has said.
San Jose Mercury News: By firing atoms of metal at another metal, Russian and American scientists have discovered a new element -- No. 118 on the Periodic Table -- that is the heaviest substance known and probably hasn't existed since the universe was in its infancy
ABC News: Despite the controversy that still surrounds the use of nuclear power, a Russian energy company has planned to build a floating nuclear power plant to fill the energy needs of the country's northern territories.
The Christian Science Monitor: The orbiter's cameras offer the most detailed images yet of the red planet's surface.
Seattle Post Intelligencer: Scientists were excited when they pulled a 154-pound meteorite from deep below a Kansas wheat field, but what got them most electrified was the way they unearthed it.
The New York Times: The declaration last Monday by North Korea that it had conducted a successful atomic test brought to nine the number of nations believed to have nuclear arms. But atomic officials estimate that as many as 40 more countries have the technical skill, and in some cases the required material, to build a bomb.
San Francisco Chronicle: A 6.6 magnitude earthquake and more than 40 aftershocks rocked the Hawaiian islands Sunday, collapsing roofs and causing landslides and widespread power outages.
Reuters: Scientists said on Monday that they had found the first direct evidence linking the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica to global warming widely blamed on human activities.
Science: Long-term visitors to the moon will have to cope with daily temperatures that rise and fall up to 250 degrees Celsius. But that's nothing compared to the day-night cycle on Upsilon Andromedae b, a giant extrasolar planet some 40 lightyears away. Going from the nightside to the dayside of this planet would be like jumping from an iceberg into a volcano, according to the first temperature variation measurements of a planet outside our solar system.
Two papers in Arxiv highlight new data about dark matter galaxies near the Milky Way. In the first paper, astro-ph/0608528, the group reports on the Milky Way satellite dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies, which are the smallest dark matter dominated systems in the universe. Dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe, but are usually only observed indirectly. The paper claims that the density of dSph objects follow a predictive pattern not expected by astronomers. The paper is in press to be published in Nuclear Physics B.
Some researchers from that research group have also announced with additional colleagues, the discovery of five new satellites of the Milky Way in paper astro-ph/0608448. The new objects were found in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). They include four probable new dwarf galaxies -- one each in the constellations of Coma Berenices, Canes Venatici, Leo and Hercules -- together with one unusually extended globular cluster, Segue 1. Their location led to the ironic title of their paper "Cats and Dogs, Hair and A Hero: A Quintet of New Milky Way Companions" In the last two years 10 new Milky Way satellites have been discovered in the SDSS which are less luminous, more irregular and appear to be more metal-poor than the previously-known nine Milky Way dwarf spheroidals. This paper has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.
Science: With its big political hurdle behind it, the make-or-break project must run a gantlet of technical challenges to see whether fusion can fulfill its promise of almost limitless energy.
Azonano.com: Current techniques for creating carbon nanotubes result in a mass of nanotubes with different electronic and structural properties. Researchers from Northwestern University have developed a method for sifting and automatically grading the nanotubes by exploiting the buoyant densities of nanotubes. These densities are a function of their size and electronic behavior. The nanotubes are dropped into water coated by soap-like molecules called surfactants. A centrifuge spins the liquid to high speed. By carefully choosing the surfactants utilized during ultracentrifugation, the researchers found that carbon nanotubes could be sorted by diameter and electronic structure. The technique can be easily scaled up to industrial production. The results were published in Nature Nanotechnology.
Nature: When an advanced prototype train crashed into a maintenance wagon in Germany late last month, 23 passengers were killed. But the accident may have also dealt a mortal blow to the long-touted idea of fast passenger trains that float on magnets, says Ned Stafford.
BBC: Scientists at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Pasadena, California, this week said that data streaming from the Venus Express probe had provided unprecedented detail of the Venusian atmosphere and the first-ever peek at its lower strata. They hope the spacecraft will help answer fundamental questions about the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics, as well as solve key Venus puzzles: what drives its "super-rotation"; are its volcanoes active; and just what is the strange ultraviolet-absorbing substance swirling at the cloud tops?
New York Times: The variations in the course Earth travels around the Sun and in the tilt of its axis are associated with episodes of global cooling. New research reported in Nature on the fossil record shows that the cyclical pattern of these phenomena corresponds to species turnover in rodents and probably other mammal groups as well. This effect provides "a crucial missing piece in the puzzle of mammal species- and genus- level evolution," and "offers a plausible explanation for the characteristic duration of more or less 2.5 million years of the mean species life span in mammals."
Das Spiegel: The last known tsunami to hit Europe was over 8,000 years ago. But new research reveals that there have been a number of deep- sea earthquakes since then, and that a landslide along the continental slopes could pose a serious risk to the cities and towns on the North Sea coast.
Wall Street Journal: When he arrived in Australia 18 years ago as a physics student, Shi Zhengrong scraped by on a meager stipend from the Chinese government that he supplemented by working at a restaurant. Now, a doctorate, several patents, two solar- power companies and a $455 million initial public offering later, Shi is now one of the richest people in China with a worth of over $3 billion.
NPR: Josh and Jayce Gladden of Mississippi, describe a simple science experiment they conducted involving sound. They struck a wire and recorded the time it took for the sound to move along it.
Nature: Werner Marx and Andreas Barth have decided to revise their recently published paper on the future of high-temperature superconductivity research after complaints about their ominous conclusions. They stand by their data, they say, but add that some things could perhaps have
been better phrased.
Financial Times: The insurance industry must do more to address the negative effects that global warming may have on its business and its customers, say insurer Allianz, and World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group. The industry should work with modellers and scientists to increase the accuracy of climate change modelling says their report which was released Tuesday. "The way insurance is priced, we look backward not forward, so it's important to understand climate change and know what we're dealing with," said Clem Booth, a board member at Allianz. "Our customers will be affected by it, our shareholders could be threatened by it."
Various: William J. Perry in the Washington Post and Peter Grier in the Christian Science Monitor write about the history of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and the political and scientific implications of Monday's nuclear test. Nuclear physicist Wolfgang Panofsky is quoted in USA Today as stating that he believes the North Korean test only partially exploded. Nature magazine talks to other physicists about the size of the nuclear device. BBC Newsnight magazine looks at the history of failed weapons tests. The Rocky Mountain News looks at the US National Earthquake Information Center, whose phones have been ringing off the hook since Monday.
Meanwhile, the LA Times looks at efforts to block North Korea from selling their nuclear technology to other countries. Says former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, "There is virtually nothing on the face of the Earth that the North Koreans have gotten their hands on that they haven't been willing to sell."
Innovations Report: A new bowling simulator may enable you to do just that. The machine is the first of its kind to use physics, real cricket balls and novel speed and spin generating mechanisms to imitate realistic deliveries (e.g. spin, swing and pace) as generated by professional cricket players. Dr Andy West, the machine’s inventor at Loughborough University described it at an Institute of Physics conference, Physics and Engineering - Synergy for Success, today.
SA business report: The South African government is close to purchasing a new water pressurized nuclear power plant from French engineering firm Areva says Alec Erwin, South Africa's public enterprises minister. The move is related to South Africa's increasing energy demands and delays in building South Africa's own gas bed modular reactor (PBMR) prototype. The South African government has an ulterior motive for buying a Areva reactor. The PBMR company has been courting Areva to take a stake in the company since the US-based Exelon company pulled out in 2002. Currently Japanese-owned Westinghouse Electric Company is South Africa's only international partner, with a 35 percent stake in the PBMR project.
Azom: US Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Samuel W. Bodman has announced that Sandia National Laboratories is the new home of the National Laboratory Center for Solid-State Lighting Research and Development. Sandia will conduct vital solid-state lighting research and coordinate related research efforts at several other national laboratories. DOE will provide funding of $5 million for seven research projects in solid-state lighting, including $2.6 million for four Sandia projects, Bodman said. The funding comes from DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
NPR: Scientists are still trying to determine whether the North Korean explosion on Monday was caused by a nuclear bomb. As stated yesterday seismic signals of a artifical explosion were heard around the world, but that alone does not prove the blast was nuclear.
North Korea: The North Korean government has announced that it has conducted a underground nuclear test. The U.S. Geological Survey, the South Korean government, the Chinese government, the Russian government and the Comprehesive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) monitoring system have all confirmed that a artifical earthquake was detected at 10:35 a.m. Monday 9 October local time (9:35 p.m. Sunday EDT) 240 miles northeast of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital about 45 miles north of the North Korean town of Kimchaek.. The region is home to North Korea's missile testing facilities and believed to be one of the most likely sites for testing underground an atomic bomb.
The U.S. Geological Survey registered a "seismic event" of magnitude 4.2, said Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist at the agency. South Korea's state geological research center detected a tremor of magnitude 3.58-3.7 said South Korean news agencyYonhap. According to the ITAR-Tass news agency, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Verkhovtsev, head of a Defense Ministry department, said "It is 100% (certain) that it was an underground nuclear explosion." However, although Russia said that its monitoring services picked up the seismic event, they did not detect any radiation. The US government was informed of the seismic reading about one hour after the explosion, and minutes before North Korea released its official statement on the blast (see below). Shortly afterwards, the Chinese government released a statement simultaneously recognizing and condemning the test. U.S., South Korean and Japanese authorities said they were still reviewing intelligence data but had no reason to immediately doubt the veracity of the Pyongyang government's claim.
USA Today: US President George W. Bush has authorized a sweeping new national space policy, green-lighting an overarching national policy that governs the conduct of America's space activities.
The new policy supports not only a moon, Mars and beyond exploration agenda, but also responds to a post 9/11 world of terrorist actions, such as the need for intelligence-gathering internal and external to the United States. It also states that the US will not recognise any attempts by commericial organizations or other governments to lay claim to outer space resources, such as water deposits on the Moon.
Science: A parade of presidential hopefuls, none of whom are currently the frontrunners, traveled to Fleurance, a tiny village 700 kilometers south of Paris last weekend, to engage scientists in debate and promise them better times at the annual retreat of Sauvons la Recherche (SLR). The French presidential election will be held in April-May 2007.
The two frontrunnerts, Nicholas Sarkozy, the populist minister of the interior and the frontrunner in the conservative party UMP, declined to attend, and Ségolène Royal, the leading Socialist Party (PS) candidate--who would be France's first female president if elected--agreed to come months ago but canceled at the last minute, angering some of the more than 400 participants. The remaining seven candidates did turn up. Says SLR president Bertrand Monthubert."We have never had an opportunity like this before."
Hattiesburg American.com: Christopher Sirola talks about how the shape of a dome, such as an observatory dome, can lead to whispers - even on the other side of the dome - to be amplified and heard across the dome.
The New York Times: About 50 veterans of the Manhattan Project gathered in Los Alamos, N.M., as part of three days of events to commemorate their work on the atomic bomb.
Science: Nanotechnology observers are split over the best way to ensure that the up-and-coming industry remains safe for both people and the environment.
The Christian Science Monitor: Using better instruments and more powerful computers, scientists are demonstrating key aspects of physics with unprecedented precision.
Space.com: Astronomers have looked under the hoods of quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, and found some of the best evidence yet for the black holes that are thought to power them.
International Herald Tribune: NASA is basking in the glow of a Nobel Prize awarded to one of its scientists and to a Berkeley astronomer for research performed on a satellite built by NASA. The award is richly deserved, and the agency deserves great credit for making the work possible. Too bad the program that yielded these pioneering discoveries was reined in not long ago so that NASA could pour billions of dollars into resuming shuttle flights, finishing the international space station, and developing spacecraft to pursue the Bush administration's ambitious space exploration program.
Nature: Two recently published books are riling the small but influential community of string theorists, by arguing that the field is wandering dangerously far from the mainstream.
MSNBC: Beaming people in "Star Trek" fashion is still in the realms of science fiction, but physicists in Denmark have used weird quantum teleportation to transfer information from photons to atoms, bringing the dream of lightning-fast quantum computers closer to reality.
The Washington Post: NASA scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered what they believe are 16 new planets deep in the Milky Way, leading them to conclude there are probably billions of planets spread throughout the galaxy.
ScienceNow: Darth Vader might be disappointed to hear it, but the force of gravity does not have a dark side. Dark matter does not pull on other dark matter with any extra gravity or additional force, as some researchers have suggested, a pair of theoretical physicists reports. Based on observations of a pip-squeak galaxy orbiting our own, more massive, Milky Way galaxy, the argument could shoot down theories invented to explain other puzzling observations. Some researchers are skeptical, however.
Environmental News Network: Pollution experts have "serious scientific concerns" that newly unveiled U.S. air quality standards may pose risks to human health and welfare, according to a letter made public Tuesday.
MSNBC: Weather that originates at the sun, not here on Earth, is responsible for radio waves that cause an unusual shape of two belts of radiation that encircle Earth and contain "killer electrons" that can damage satellites and pose a risk to space travelers, scientists report.
The Australian: Physicist Deb Kane has seen many prospective scientists steered away by parents who want their children to earn big money.
"I have been sitting at Macquarie University information days with a young person and the parent and very often the young person is mad keen on physics and the parent beside them counsels them that they don't think that's a very good idea," Professor Kane said.
A study this year by Macquarie of enrolments in university science, engineering and technology found that many prospective students were being funnelled into finance careers for their promise of riches.
The Register: The consortium operating the lab expects to cleave off hundreds of jobs in an effort to lower costs. The lab faces serious financial challenges under its new management, which has to account for close to $200m more in various costs than previous manager University of California (UC). The prospect of lost jobs in New Mexico has prompted local politicians to mount their soap boxes.
The Washington Post: One of nature's most lovely creations sometimes blankets large areas but rarely gets the close look it deserves. But take photos of just four snowflakes, print millions of copies, and you have this year's holiday postage stamps, being issued Thursday in New York and on sale nationwide Friday.
The New York Times: A report last month by the National Academy of Sciences documents widespread bias against women in science and engineering and recommends a sweeping overhaul of our institutions says Margaret Wertheim. The reason is not academia bureaucracy, but more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed physics, astronomy and mathematics as inherently male.
However, Cathy Young in the Boston Globe writes that maybe the findings of the National Academy of Science report could be explained by the make up of the panel's members.
Says Young:
Ultimately, the report is a missed opportunity. It could have addressed the personal and family choices women could make to maximize their career potential, or looked at the factors in the high achievement of Asian-American women in science. (Asian-Americans are virtually ignored in all the talk of minority women in science.) Instead, it upholds an orthodoxy of female victimization. Women, and science, deserve better
Nobel Prize Foundation: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation"
American duo wins 2006 Nobel physics prize
Reuters
A list of related stories from Physics Today is available. This list will continue to be updated throughout the day. Last update 4:06 EST.
BBC: Two countries, Argentina and China, have lost their bid to host the billion dollar Square Kilometer Array, the largest proposed radio telescope over the next twenty years, leaving only Australia and South Africa in competition.
The Australian site would be at Mileura station, about 100 km west of Meekathara in Western Australia. The South Africa site would be at Karoo in the Northern Cape, about 95km from Carnarvon. The vast size of the project would mean that outlying dishes of the proposed Karoo site would be in Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, Mauritius, and Ghana says the Johannesburg Business Day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that New Zealand might host some outlying dishes if Australia is chosen as the final location. A final decision on the site location will be made in 2010, after extensive testing at both sites with prototype SKA equipment. The actual telescope is scheduled to go into operation in 2014.
ScienceNow: Enormous suns have baffled astronomers for years. On the one hand, young stars eventually produce so much radiation that they ought to repel any surrounding building material, and computer models suggested this should limit their mass to about 10 times that of the sun. On the other hand, direct observations routinely turn up bodies more than twice that size. What phenomenon could be creating such stellar giants?
The Christian Science Monitor: MIT's fabrication laboratories aim to help developing communities find innovative solutions to local needs.
USA Today: Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online.
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