Nova: In preparation for the launch of NPR's new series, absolute zero, Peter Tyson asks a number of physicists if you can't get colder than 0 on the Kelvin scale, is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?
December 2007 Archives
New York Times: In 1950 Alabama, a small cotton producing town called Huntsville lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its fortune. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon.
Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969.
Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers.
BBC: North Korea has failed to meet a deadline to disclose details of its nuclear programme by the end of 2007.
NPR: Physicists are using the largest telescope in Antarctica to probe the farthest edges of the universe. South Pole Telescope scientists discuss their 280-ton scope, what they hope it will show them — and what it's like to live and work on the southernmost continent.
Nature: Physics takes a hit despite earlier promises.
Related news picks
2008 US science budget a big disappointment (ScienceNow) December 19
Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off (Physics Today) December 21
Telegrapah.co.uk: The world's best known scientist, Prof Stephen Hawking, has added his name to a petition signed by thousands of physicists who are outraged by Government cuts.
BBC: A new type of super-efficient household light bulb is being developed which could spell the end of regular bulbs.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: I had intended to write this month's column about a talk given by Tom D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), on his plans to reorganize the nuclear weapons complex for the twenty-first century. Instead, I'm writing about why I wasn't allowed to hear D'Agostino's talk.
The New York Times: Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.
BBC: Science can be a lonely business.
The New York Times: North Korea is likely to miss a year-end deadline to declare all of its nuclear activities and disable its main nuclear site, the South Korean foreign minister said on Thursday.
Technology Review: Advanced biofuels, more-efficient vehicles, and solar power top the most notable energy stories of 2007.
San Jose Mercury News: If many scientists get their Christmas wish, an asteroid the size of a Boeing 737 jet will slam into Mars late next month, potentially leaving a crater more than half a mile wide.
Telegraph.co.uk: A "universe in a test tube" that could be used to assess theories of everything has been created by physicists.
Nature: Physicists whittle down the number of truly fundamental constants.
Physics Today: Fermilab Director Pier Oddone informed the laboratory's staff Thursday the implications of the proposed FY08 federal budget on the facility. Congress changed Fermilab's proposed budget from $372 million to $320 million--a cut of $52 million. The budget cuts are because of $22 billion in savings Congress had to make in order for the President not to veto the budget.
Continue reading Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off.
Venture Beat: Nuclear power is a bit of a land mine in the field of clean technology. Mention it in any given room of environmentalists, and opinions will explode. Some say nuclear’s terminally unsafe. Others say it’s the only true cleantech solution.
PC World: IBM's uptight, starched-shirt image has survived for many decades, but the stereotype may finally meet its demise at the hands of a giant boulder and a meeting room up in the sky.
BBC: A new idea could explain how the climate of early Mars became warm enough to support oceans.
Scientific American: A "clean coal" power plant is set to be built in Illinois in 2009; if it works, it could help avoid catastrophic global warming
The Economist: In Britain, fundamental physics is in a pickle
Nature: What physicists want for Christmas is a solution to the philosophical conundrums of quantum mechanics. They will be disappointed, but work that dissolves one aspect of quantum weirdness is some consolation.
Los Angeles Times: Pacific Gas & Electric Co. went surfing Tuesday, becoming the first U.S. utility to commit to buying electricity generated by the tumult of the sea.
National Geographic News: The moon was formed from fragments of Earth after a collision with a giant asteroid relatively late in our planet's formation, new tests of moon rocks show.
ScienceNow: The White House and Congress delivered a heavy blow to the hopes of the U.S. science community yesterday as part of a long-delayed final agreement on the 2008 federal budget. As a result, what began as a year of soaring rhetoric in support of science seems likely to end with agency officials and research advocates shaking their heads and wondering what went wrong.
The New York Times: Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.
National Geographic: The bright yellowish-orange "star" poised above the constellation Gemini is actually the planet Mars, and this week the icy world is making its closest approach to Earth until 2016.
InsideBayArea.com: The Department of Energy revealed draft plans Tuesday to consolidate nuclear weapons work at eight sites, including Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, a move that could result in a 20 to 30 percent reduction in work force and the closing of 600 buildings.
Azom.com: At the high energy physics department of the “Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas” (CIEMAT) the fundamental objective is the study of the elementary constituents of matter, radiation, and the forces that are responsible for their interactions using energetic collisions at particle accelerators and detectors in underground labs.
MSNBC: Meteorites linked to an explosion in biodiversity millions of years ago
AZoNano.com: For the first time ever, an exclusive, comprehensive platform of the entire Israeli Nanotech eco-system has been launched. It is an all inclusive portal, mapping the entire Nanotech ecosystem, including over 300 researchers, 80 companies and 40 governmental and nonprofit organizations.
ScienceNow: Although improvements in laptop computers and other electronics continue at a torrid pace, the batteries that power them have made only modest strides in recent years. A new advance in nanotechnology could change all that. Lithium ion batteries made with tiny whiskers of silicon can store as much as 10 times the charge of conventional rechargeables, researchers report. In principle, the new technology could result in laptop batteries that run for days and electric cars that cruise for hundreds of kilometers on a single charge--but it must still clear some key hurdles to make it to market.
Science: In 1971, meteorologists Roland Madden and Paul Julian studied weather data from near-equatorial Pacific islands. To their surprise, tropospheric winds, pressure, and rainfall oscillated with a period of about 40 to 50 days. The oscillation in clouds and precipitation tends to be confined to the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans, but the oscillation in winds and pressure is felt throughout the tropics. The search for a single robust theory for this Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) continues today.
The MJO is not a true oscillation, in the sense that its period varies and its appearance is episodic, but it is the largest source of tropical weather variability on subseasonal time scales, especially in the Indian and Pacific oceans. In last week's Science Matthews et al. use observations from the new Argos system of profiling floats to reveal the deep-ocean response to the MJO. Also in the same issue, Miura et al. report an advance in modeling the MJO.
Huliq.com: CERN Director General Robert Aymar today delivered an end of year status report at the 145th meeting of Council, the Organization’s governing body. Dr Aymar reported a year of excellent progress towards the goal of starting physics research at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in summer 2008.
Council also approved a budget for CERN in 2008 that will allow consolidation of CERN’s aging infrastructure to begin, along with preparations for an intensity upgrade for the LHC, by 2016.
Wired: On a recent Wednesday night the crowd spilled out the door at San Francisco’s Axis Café, where the draw wasn't a hot band or a talented bartender, but a lecture. On physics.
Toby Garfield, an oceanographer at San Francisco State University, was explaining the science of big ocean waves, like the giant Mavericks surf break about 25 miles away. As he showed slides of the ocean floor and explained that the coast is a system of energy dissipation, the crowd peppered him with questions. Why do waves come in sets? What are rogue waves? How is the United States harnessing the power of waves to make renewable energy?
Scenes like this are being repeated across the country at science cafes, where contemporary science -- a topic that Americans supposedly find dull -- is drawing substantial crowds month after month, even on topics as nerdy as gene sequencing and dark matter.
New York Times: In the past large corporations — like RCA, Xerox and the old AT&T — maintained internal laboratories like Bell Labs. These corporate labs were essentially research universities embedded in private companies, and their employees published academic papers, spoke at conferences and even gave away valuable breakthroughs.
Almost no corporate labs based on the Bell or Xerox model remain, victims of cost-cutting and a new appreciation by corporate leaders that commercial innovations may flow best when scientists and engineers stick to business problems.
Instead, corporations are paying universities to get greater access to academic laboratories. Stanford has paired with Exxon Mobil in a deal worth $100 million over 10 years. The University of California, Davis, is getting $25 million from Chevron. And Intel has opened collaborative laboratories with Berkeley, the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon.
NPR: "Rogue waves" are monsters of the open ocean — the powerful "walls of water" can destroy even large ships. Satellite measurements have found them to be up to 100 feet tall. So far, scientists have disagreed about what causes the waves, but researchers at UCLA think that they may have found a clue.
Nature: Turning optical-fibre messages into sound could help store the information.
Environmental News Network: Europe toned down a clash with the United States over 2020 climate goals on the final day of U.N. talks in Bali on Friday, raising hopes of a deal to start negotiations on a new global warming treaty.
The Economist: The building blocks for life emerged on Mars—but not life itself
Reuters: There is already enough carbon in Earth's atmosphere to ensure that sea levels will rise several feet (meters) in coming decades and summertime ice will vanish from the North Pole, scientists warned on Thursday.
Physics Today: The CERN Council has appointed Rolf- Dieter Heuer to succeed Robert Aymar as CERN's Director General. Since 2004 Heuer has been the research director for particle and astroparticle physics at Germany's DESY laboratory in Hamburg. "Heuer has worked tirelessly for DESY as Germany's main particle physics laboratory, while at the same time strengthening links between DESY, the German University system and CERN," said President of the CERN council Torsten Åkesson. "This spirit of collaboration will be a valuable asset to CERN as we move into LHC operation, develop strategic options for the long- term scientific program, and develop collaboration with the European national laboratories and institutes."
Continue reading Rolf- Dieter Heuer is CERN's next Director General.
Salon.com: Fed up with politicians and the media, scientists are pleading to the world to wake up to the imminent threats of global warming.
TG Daily: Rochester (NY) - Physicsts at the University of Rochester have created an extremely simple, elegant device which can capture generated ultra-cold polar molecules by the truckload. The new device greatly simplifies an existing complex process that, according to the report, only four labs in the world were capable of performing. This new process is not only faster and less costly, but it also results in a continuous, near perfect yield of their desired molecules. Scientists believe this ability will help them develop exotic crystals and eventually stable quantum computers.
The Christian Science Monitor: The White House has misled the public on climate science, a congressional report says.
The New York Times: The lame wheel on the NASA Mars rover Spirit has proved an invaluable science tool, turning up evidence of a once habitable environment, scientists said Monday.
The Wall Street Journal: Even as interest grows in a potential new generation of U.S. nuclear-power plants, scrutiny of existing ones is intensifying.
CNET: Scientists are trying to peer a bit further into the future than the typical five-day weather forecasts available today.
Wired: For years, no military program has sparked more fevered speculation from conspiracy theorists than the mysterious High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. And for years, the Pentagon has been pooh-poohing speculation that the enormous collection of transmitters, radars, and magnetometers in Alaska was some sort of superweapon.
BBC: The UK government is to review its funding for physics after scientists warned of an £80m research shortfall that could lead to 750 physicists losing their jobs. Science Minister Ian Pearson said funding arrangements would be reviewed, but did not promise extra money.
"Scientific research is not a luxury, it is a necessity," Dr Brian Cox, of Manchester University's School of Physics and Astronomy, said of the shortfall.
Wired: About 400 technical hobbyists are taking advantage of a glut of surplus precision timekeeping gear to pursue a serious interest in very precise timekeeping. They call themselves Time Nuts, and they spend their spare cycles collecting, repairing, tweaking -- and occasionally using -- super-precise atomic clocks. Wired magazines has the details on how to build your own atomic clock.
New Scientist: A paper in Nature Physics suggests that a desktop synchrotron particle accelerator could soon be able to freeze-frame the frenetic motion of atoms and molecules. An international team of physicists led by Dino Jaroszynski of Strathclyde University in Scotland have built a prototype light source, which they claim can be upgraded to produce intense, ultra-short pulses of X-rays. Synchrotrons are in great demand because their intense X-ray beams have so many uses, from analysing biological molecules to etching electronic components and seeing inside microscopic fossils.
Los Angeles Times: The shell of solar gases that encircles our star system has been dinged up by passing through the rubble of stars that exploded millions of years ago say researchers at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The data is from the 30-year-old Voyager 2 spacecraft that just passed through what's known as the termination shock, the boundary of the bubble of energy carried by the solar wind to the far edge of the solar system. Voyager 2 reached the barrier a billion miles closer to the sun than Voyager 1, its companion spacecraft that is taking a more southern path to interstellar space.
ABC7: Los Alamos National Laboratory reports about 450 people have applied to voluntarily leave their jobs at the lab. Lab employees who decide to voluntarily leave had until yesterday to submit their applications. The move is in light of a $170 million shortfall in LANL's budget, brought about by budget cuts and the transfer to a new for-profit management company to run the lab. Both LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are expected to between 450-750 job cuts each over the coming year.
San Francisco Chronicle: Al Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and urged the United States and China to make the boldest moves on climate change or "stand accountable before history for their failure to act."
The New York Times: The world's top two polluters, the U.S. and China, say they are not ready to commit to mandatory caps on greenhouse gases.
Science Online: Physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets
BBC: All UK homes could be powered by offshore wind farms by 2020 as part of the fight against climate change, under plans unveiled by John Hutton.
ABC News: Oak Ridge National Laboratory says breach could have compromised visitor information
Los Angeles Times: The donation to Caltech and the University of California will help produce an instrument with a nearly 100-foot mirror.
Nature: International researchers put their names to a proposal for emissions cuts.
EETimes: India's national nanotechnology program is rolling out as the first of three Institutes for Nano Science and Technology is inaugurated under the federal government's $250 million national initiative in support of nanotechnological research. The regional government of Karnataka partner with the government in the establishment of the first institute, eager to promote Bengaluru a global hub for nanotechnology as in the past it has promoted it as a software hub.
Nature: Cooled to temperatures just above absolute zero, solid helium starts to behave very oddly. But its 'supersolid' behaviour might just be the result of imperfections that change the bulk properties of the crystal.
Reuters: IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.
Guardian Unlimited: Laser fusion Magnetic fusion has long been heralded as the future of renewable energy, but could it be lasers that hold the key? James Randerson looks into science's latest power saviour
The Wall Street Journal: Syracuse University physicist Gianfranco Vidali spends most of his time studying how molecules are made in outer space, but a couple of months ago he abruptly dropped his interstellar research to address an earthly issue: the global shortage of helium.
Nature: 103-year-old chemical reaction pops up again
Physics News Update: Interpretations of recent infrared observations might be changing our view of the Moon. About 4.5 billion years ago, our Earth was utterly shattered-the victim of a giant impact with an object the size of Mars. The collision that was powerful enough to vaporize rock and throw a massive plume of Earth’s mantle into space was not all bad, though. The impactor soon merged with the Earth giving it a fast spin, while chunks of Earth's mantle settled into a disk around our planet. Within a year or so, a large moon was formed out of this debris. The left-over rocks continued to circle around the sun over the next million years, occasionally colliding and creating a flow of dust, until it was all cleaned up by gravity and solar radiation. Many scientists are interested in knowing how common such impacts are in other young solar systems because the heavy tidal mixing driven by the moon’s gravity may have played an important role in making conditions favorable for the origins of life on Earth. Recently Nadya Gorlova of the University of Florida and her colleagues at the Steward observatory in Tucson, Arizona and the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile reported in The Astrophysical Journal that they may not be very common at all.
Continue reading A Moon Like Ours Is Rarely Formed.
salon.com: The most groundbreaking science is being done outside academia and government. And the egomaniacal geneticist is leading the way.
San Francisco Chronicle: A year ago, George Smoot won the Nobel Prize for physics. He used $500,000 of his award to finance a dream, and on Tuesday it came to life: the $8.1 million Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics.
BBC: Iran has welcomed a major US intelligence report that suggests its government is not currently trying to develop nuclear weapons.
USA Today: The first stars to form in the universe may not have shone like those today, but instead may have been invisible "dark stars" powered by the annihilation of dark matter, a new study finds.
The New York Times: Next August, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand.
MSNBC: High school students sweep competition, winning $100,000 scholarships
NPR: NPR look at two different techniques for generating power without having to worry about CO2 emissions. Richard Harris visits Iceland to see how the country uses 'hot rocks' to generate power. Iceland is a geo-active area in which hot magma, usually ten-of-miles deep under the Earth, is close to the surface. Engineers pump water close to the magma, turning it to high pressure steam which is used to run turbines and supply hot water to the surrounding towns. One accident at the plant led to a 50m deep crater known as 'Man's Hell', a reminder of the dangers of geothermal operations. Meanwhile Greg Allen visits a prototype turbine that will be dropped into the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream has a strong and predictable North-East current about 15 miles off the coast of Florida, making it ideal for providing a reliable power source for potentially one-third of Florida's needs. As well as using turbines to generate power, researchers at Florida's Atlantic University are also investigating the thermal differences between the warm surface water and the deep cold water near the ocean floor. Exploiting these ocean thermal differences remains a goal of a number of university labs worldwide.
Continue reading Researchers look to oceans, volcanoes to generate power.
The Washington Post: The Bush administration likes to boast that it has dramatically cut the size of the nation's nuclear stockpile. Meanwhile, it's busily trying to shore up congressional support for multibillion-dollar proposals to "modernize" the bristling U.S. arsenal. A world that's skeptical about the last superpower's intentions only gets more so when U.S. officials push unconvincing lines about the world's deadliest weapons. So here are a few myths about the U.S. nuclear posture of which the administration seems particularly fond.
BBC: Governments at a key UN climate summit will discuss how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions after the current Kyoto Protocol targets expire in 2012.
The Washington Post: After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch this week a European-built laboratory that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station. Although some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device -- one that many scientists contend would produce far more significant knowledge.
Continue reading AMS-2: The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind.
BBC: The Keeling Curve may be scarcely known outside scientific circles, but the jagged upward slope showing rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere has become one of the most famous graphs in science, and a potent symbol of our times.
It was 50 years ago that a young American scientist, Charles David Keeling, began tracking very precise measurements of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at two of the world's last wildernesses - the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.
His remarkable data set sounded some of the first alarm bells over the build-up of the gas in the atmosphere, and has led to the tracking of greenhouse gases worldwide.
Science: A novel program at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support innovative ways of communicating science faces an uncertain fate. The 4-year-old Discovery Corps Fellowship (DCF) program has attracted few applicants, and in a time of tight funding, a new program solicitation that's about to hit the streets could be its last. Fellows say one big obstacle is that the scientific community, for all its handwringing about a scientifically illiterate public, still views outreach as a dubious activity for those on an academic career path.
Christian Science Monitor: Engineers who want to produce hydrogen for fuel have to think outside the box. Standard processes are too costly and inefficient. A sample of research reported this year illustrates the unexpected possibilities such creative thinking opens up.
Associated Press: Chris Comer, the Texas state’s director of science curriculum said she resigned this month under pressure from officials who said she had given the appearance of criticizing the teaching of intelligent design.
The Texas Education Agency put the director on 30 days’ paid administrative leave in late October, resulting in what Ms. Comer called a forced resignation.
The move came shortly after she forwarded an e-mail message announcing a presentation by Barbara Forrest, an author of “Creationism’s Trojan Horse.” The book argues that creationist politics are behind the movement to get intelligent design theory taught in public schools. Ms. Comer sent the message to several people and a few online communities.
“Ms. Comer’s e-mail implies endorsement of the speaker and implies that T.E.A. endorses the speaker’s position on a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” said a representative of the Texas Education Agency.
