October 2009 Archives

Nature News: A new generation of light sources—the newly completed Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, one under construction in Japan and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) being built at at DESY in Germany—are getting set not only to put atoms and molecules under the spotlight, but also to illuminate their dynamics.

The devices, called X-ray free-electron lasers, produce flashes of X-ray light with angstrom-level wavelengths—small and coherent enough to image individual atoms. The flashes are also more intense than any created before—stuffed with enough photons to create and study extreme states of matter such as plasma.

But perhaps most importantly, the bursts of light are short—just hundreds of femtoseconds long, the time it takes for light to cross a human hair. Pulses as brief as this can record functions, not just forms: the folding of a protein, the action of a catalyst, the splitting of a chemical bond.

Science: The two great ice sheets—Greenland's and Antarctica's—are closely monitored for ice loss.

Surveys of ice-sheet volume made from planes and satellites have quantified these losses, but those assessments have been spotty in time, space, or both.

Now the latest analysis of the most comprehensive, essentially continuous monitoring of the ice sheets shows that the losses have not eased in the past few years. More ominously, losses from both Greenland and Antarctica appear to have accelerated during the past 7 years.

BBC News: Scientists in Italy think they may have come up with a new way to scan for cancer of the stomach or colon.

The 'spider pill,' which is fitted with a camera, is swallowed by the patient and once within the colon or intestine the legs are opened and the device crawls along the intestine tract, taking pictures as it goes.

ISNS: With the speed of computers so regularly seeing dramatic increases in their processing speed, it seems that it shouldn't be too long before the machines become infinitely fast—except they can't.

A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we'll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip. His prediction became known as Moore's Law, and it has held true throughout the evolution of computers—the fastest processor today beats out a ten-year-old competitor by a factor of about 30.

If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get.

"If we believe in Moore's law ... then it would take about 75 to 80 years to achieve this quantum limit," Levitin said.

"No system can overcome that limit. It doesn't depend on the physical nature of the system or how it's implemented, what algorithm you use for computation ... any choice of hardware and software," Levitin said. "This bound poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light."

Scott Aaronson, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, thought Levitin's estimate of 75 years extremely optimistic.

Moore's Law, he said, probably won't hold for more than 20 years.

In the early 1980s, Levitin singled out a quantum elementary operation, the most basic task a quantum computer could carry out. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Levitin and Toffoli present an equation for the minimum sliver of time it takes for this elementary operation to occur. This establishes the speed limit for all possible computers.

Using their equation, Levitin and Toffoli calculated that, for every unit of energy, a perfect quantum computer spits out ten quadrillion more operations each second than today's fastest processors. 

"It's very important to try to establish a fundamental limit—how far we can go using these resources," Levitin explained.

The physicists pointed out that technological barriers might slow down Moore's law as we approach this limit. Quantum computers, unlike electrical ones, can't handle "noise"—a kink in a wire or a change in temperature can cause havoc. Overcoming this weakness to make quantum computing a reality will take time and more research.

As computer components are packed tighter and tighter together, companies are finding that the newer processors are getting hotter sooner than they are getting faster. Hence the recent trend in duo and quad-core processing; rather than build faster processors, manufacturers place them in tandem to keep the heat levels tolerable while computing speeds shoot up. Scientists who need to churn through vast numbers of calculations might one day turn to superconducting computers cooled to drastically frigid temperatures. But even with these clever tactics, Levitin and Toffoli said, there's no getting past the fundamental speed limit.

Aaronson called it beautiful that such a limit exists.

"From a theorist's perspective, it's good to know that fundamental limits are there, sort of an absolute ceiling," he said. "You may say it's disappointing that we can't build infinitely fast computers, but as a picture of the world, if you have a theory of physics allows for infinitely fast computation, there could be a problem with that theory."

Lauren Schenkman
First published at Inside Science News

NYTimes.com: Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with CERN's Large Hadron Collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Nielsen and Ninomiya put this idea forward in a series of papers: "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

"It is our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Nielsen told the New York Times in an email.

Nature: Since the Big Bang, the Universe's initial expansion has been gradually slowed by the gravitational pull from the mass it contains. Most of this mass is in the form of invisible and mysterious dark matter. Today, however, the Universe seems to be re-accelerating under the influence of even weirder stuff dubbed dark energy.

Almost nothing is understood about either dark matter or dark energy—but both are many times more common than visible matter.

Tracking the expansion of the Universe, from which the relative amounts of dark matter and dark energy can be inferred, requires measuring the distances to galaxies. Distances have always been the bane of astronomy: there are no simple red and green glasses to extrude our two-dimensional picture of the sky into an expanding movie.

Three rival techniques are currently trying to establish themselves as the best probe of cosmological expansion: observations of exploding stars called type Ia supernovae, the focal lengths of gravitational lenses, and baryon acoustic oscillations.

Astronomer Richard Massey from Edinburgh's Institute for Astronomy assess the advantages and disadvantages of the three techniques.

Related Link
Cosmology: Dark is the new black

Wall Street Journal: Hamid Biglari went from physics to finance. Now, he's helping lead efforts to revive Citigroup Inc. Born and raised in Tehran, Hamid Biglari came to the US in 1977 to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University.

Biglari planned to return in Tehran after getting his degree, but the 1979 Iranian Revolution derailed his plans. He realized that his career opportunities would be better in the US so filed for permanent residency.

After earning his PhD in astrophysics at Princeton in 1987 he became a theoretical physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, writing one of the most cited papers in Tokamak fusion research.

But research budget cuts made Biglari consider a career in finance.

He had no business experience, but he cold-called management consultancy McKinsey & Co., and successfully persuaded them to hire him, based on his analytical and computational skills.

After moving to Citigroup in 2000, earlier this year Biglari became vice chairman in charge of strategy and resource allocation, a key post in reframing the company after last year's billion dollar loss.

Nature News: The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), near Gakona, Alaska, has for twenty years used radio waves to probe Earth's magnetic field and ionosphere.

One of the most visible results of the experiments—since the facility upgraded its transmission power output from 1 to 3.6 megawatts—is that they can create lights in the sky that are similar to auroras.

The technique works by using the high-frequency radio waves to accelerate electrons in the atmosphere, increasing the energy of their collisions and thereby creating a glow.

In February last year, HAARP unexpectedly managed to induce a strange bullseye pattern in the night sky. "This is the really exciting part—we've made a little artificial piece of ionosphere," said US Air Force Research Laboratory physicist Todd Pedersen to Nature's Naomi Lubick.

ScienceNow: Forgotten coin stashes suggest Roman population dropped as the republic became an empire, suggesting more than 100,000 people were killed in the Roman civil wars.

Science: Current computer-aided design tools are not making it easy for architects to design buildings for energy efficiency. New software is needed.

Related News Story
Training to climb an Everest of digital data New York Times

Physics Today: Adlène Hicheur, a 32-year-old postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—who was arrested in Vienne, France, last week—was charged earlier today on the suspicion of terrorism, say French and Swiss newspapers.

Hicheur had told investigators over the weekend that he corresponded over the internet with a contact in north Africa's al-Qaida branch, said French officials to the Guardian.

The exchange vaguely discussed plans for terror attacks, but nothing concrete was planned, the French official said, speaking on condition that his name not be used because the investigation is ongoing.

French counterterrorism and intelligence agencies have been tracking Adlène Hicheur for 18 months by reading his e-mails, says the Independent. They concluded in recent days that he had reached the "intention or desire stage" of preparing to mount an attack and arranged for his arrest.

Hicheur had been working at CERN on data analysis for the LHC since 2003. CERN issued a statement saying the following:

[Hicheur] was not a CERN employee and performed his research under a contract with an outside institute. His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism: CERN is a particle-physics research laboratory whose research addresses fundamental questions about the universe. None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain. CERN is providing the support requested by the French police in this enquiry.

Hicheur had previously worked on the BaBar experiment in the US, and at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK.

Related News Story
Hadron Collider physicist Adlene Hicheur charged with terrorism London Times

Various: The experiment to smash part of a rocket upper stage into the Moon at high speed (as reported earlier this week) went without a hitch but did not produce a visible plume 10 kilometers high as expected.

Vincent Eke, from the University of Durham, told the Independent that the lunar surface may not have reacted as expected and stressed it was still too early to know if the mission had been a success or failure.

"If it turns out to be as dull as it looked, I'd imagine the soil just didn't respond as was hoped to being hit," said Dr Eke. "It might mean we don't get sufficient data, which would be a shame."

Researchers are now analyzing the data gathered from the event, NASA told NPR, and expect to know for certain if the impact dislodged any water in about two weeks.

Related Links
Targeting the Moon: Observatories gear up for Friday lunar crash Space.com
Moon 'bombing' makes an impact—really The Independent
Spacecraft crashes into Moon in search of water NPR

APS News: Restrictions imposed by the US Air Force on the use of lasers are significantly diminishing the utility of adaptive optics for studying the cosmos, according to a number of astronomers.

The Economist: Dialysis is an unpleasant process that involves being hooked up to a huge machine—often at a hospital—at least three times a week, in order to have your blood cleansed of waste that would normally be voided, via the kidneys, as urine.

Victor Gura, of the University of California, Los Angeles, hopes to make this process more pleasant with an invention that is now undergoing clinical trials. By going back to basics, he has come up with a completely new sort of dialyser—one you can wear.

At the heart of the machine is a lightweight pump. The pump drives blood from a patient through a hollow fiber filter as well as water containing some minerals. The water is constantly purified by circulating through chemicals that capture the blood's impurities. The blood is then pumped back to the patient. The filter needs to be replaced about once a week and the chemicals once a day.

In clinical trials reported in the December 15, 2007 issue of the medical journal Lancet, five men and three women with end-stage kidney failure successfully dialyzed themselves with Gura's prototype device for up to eight hours.

Related Links
A wearable artificial kidney for patients on the go UCLA news
Some related publications
A wearable haemodialysis device for patients with end-stage renal failure: a pilot study The Lancet

New York Times: Leonardo da Vinci probably would have loved the use of scientific gadgetry to locate his lost masterpiece.

The Guardian: An orchestra of ancient instruments, many of which exist only in paintings and yellowing manuscripts, will perform its first concert at the end of the year.

Many of the instruments have not been heard since the times of Socrates in the fifth century BC, though some of the instruments date back even further, to the bronze age a thousand years earlier.

Scientists are reconstructing the sounds of the instruments, including the earliest predecessors of the bass guitar, harp and oboe, by building mathematical models of them on computers, using descriptions in ancient texts and paintings on artifacts recovered from archaeological sites in Greece.

Inside Science: Early on Tuesday morning, 1977 Nobel Prize winning physicist Philip Anderson's home phone rang. When the Princeton University emeritus professor answered, it was William Brinkman, director of the Office of Science for the US Department of Energy.

"Score another one for Bell Labs," Brinkman said, referring to the just-announced winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. Two of three winners of the 2009 prize did their research in 1969 at Bell Labs, the research arm of the then giant telephone monopoly AT&T. That brings to 13 the number of Bell Labs scientists who have won a share of the seven Nobel Prizes for work done at what was once considered the preeminent research lab in the world.

Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, NJ, still exists as part of the French-based Alcatel-Lucent telecommunications company, but it is no longer the hotbed of basic research in the physical sciences where researchers worked for decades on projects that often produced great science, but not necessarily products, for the parent company. "You're reaching pretty far back for those," Anderson said of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners.

Physics Today: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 jointly to

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge,United Kingdom
Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant, or a bacterium looks and functions.

The DNA is transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make the chemistry of life: proteins, such as oxygen-transporting hemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar.

There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions.

Ramakrishnan, Steitz, and Yonath discovered what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.

All three used X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome and created 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. X-ray crystallography is a fundamental research tool in biophysics and chemistry, and has resulted in a number of Nobel Prizes.

"Today's award is one of the great stories in biophysics," says Jason Bardi, a spokesperson for the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today). "People worked for years to get these structures, and for a long time, many in the field doubted whether it could even be done."

The ribosome is a massive protein, weighing in at 2.5 million atomic mass units (amu) and has a complicated structure.

Ribosomes are so big that they can often be spotted under electron microscopes but attempts to look at their structures using diffracted light of much shorter X-wavelengths proved to be challenging.

When the hi-resolution images of ribosomes came out a decade ago by the three laureates, it was held as a significant breakthrough. "Frankly I was stunned," says Bardi. "The ribosomal structure most familiar to me previous to that was the one that adorned my "GENES IV" textbook in graduate school. It was a big purple blob—a molecular Barney. Now suddenly, I could see a thousand interwoven protein helices and finger-like sheets and an impossibly complicated tangle of RNA. It was a truly stunning image."

Paul Guinnessy

Related Physics Today Resources
A three-dimensional x-ray image of a single pair of human chromosomes, Charles Day, February 2009
Time-resolved macromolecular crystallography, Eric A. Galburt and Barry L. Stoddard, July 2001
Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Hauptman and Karle, Bruce Schechter, December 1985
Aaron Klug wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Bertram M. Schwarzschild, January 1983

Related Resources
Protein factory reveals Its secrets Chemical & Engineering News, February 2007
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Thomas A. Steitz
Ada E. Yonath

Related News Stories
Ribosome map makers win chemistry Nobel NPR
Cambridge chemist wins Nobel prize for showing how proteins are made in cells The Guardian
Three share Nobel Prize in Chemistry Associated Press
Three win Nobel for ribosome research New York Times

Science News: For all its tumult—erupting stars, colliding galaxies, collapsing black holes—the cosmos is a surprisingly orderly place. Theoretical calculations have long shown that the entropy of the universe—a measure of its disorder—is but a tiny fraction of the maximum allowable amount.

But an analysis by Chas Egan of the Australian National University in Canberra and Charles Lineweaver of the University of New South Wales in Sydney indicates that the collective entropy of all the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies is about 100 times higher than previously calculated. Because supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to cosmic entropy, the finding suggests that the entropy of the universe is also about 100 times larger than previous estimates.

Physics Today: [First published 6:10am EST 10/6/09, last updated 11:33am EST] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half of the $1.4 million to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

"The [transfer of] information in society today is completely based on [this research]," said Joseph Nordgren, the chair of the Nobel Prize committee in a press conference announcing the prize. "The practical implications for this research were enormous...It is something that has changed our life, not just in science but in society as whole."

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, concurs. "When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe. This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

"Optics technologies are exceptionally significant for scientific developments in today’s world," said Elizabeth Rogan, CEO, of the Optical Society of America. "We congratulate Kao, Boyle and Smith on this much-deserved recognition."

Kao

In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. "It was the impurities, and other limiting factors such as scattering, atomic motion, that limited glass fibers in the 1960s," said Nordgren.

Kao presented his research at the 1966 London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970 by the Corning company.

"The Nobel Prize isn't awarded for lifetime achievement, it is given for diverse research, clearly Kao's work achieved a breakthrough that led to a whole new research and technology field," said Nordgren.

Boyle and Smith

In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device).

The two researchers came up with the idea in just an hour of brainstorming, according to Boyle who spoke during a press conference today. "It is amazing that a [the CCD device] was created so quickly," said Nordgren. "There are so many breakthroughs that came out of research at Bell labs...it's unfortunate that during the 80s, US companies abandoned the idea of having a scientific environment such as Bell labs," said Nordgren.

Boyle said that to him, the biggest achievement of his work was seeing images transmitted back from Mars. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention," he said.

The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge, when designing an image sensor, was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized how images were collected from spacecraft, by telescopes, and in medical imaging, and has eventually replaced the film camera in every aspect of photography.

Related Physics Today articles on fiber optics
Maurer and Kao win Ericsson Prize, May 1979
An Overview of Lightguide communication, Solomon J. Buchsbaum, May 1976
The fiber lightguide, Alan G. Chynoweth, May 1976
Fiber optics, Alastair M. Glass, October 1993
The golden age of optical fiber amplifiers, Emmanuel Desurvire, January 1994

Related Physics Today articles on CCDs
Charge-coupled devices would be cheap, compact Gloria B. Lubkin, October 1970
From photons to bits, Rajinder P. Khosla, December 1992

Other Related Physics Today Resources
Industrial R&D in transition, R. Joseph Anderson and Orville R. Butler, July 2009
The bell tolls for Bell Labs Toni Feder, October 2008
Industry R&D forecast is bullish despite concerns over talent dearth, Jermey N. A. Matthews, April 2008
Bell Labs fissions, yielding AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore, Gloria B. Lubkin, May 1984

Related Resources
2009 Physics Nobel Prize Resources American Institute of Physics
A 2004 oral history interview with Charles K. Kao IEEE History Center
A 2001 oral history interview with George E. Smith IEEE History Center

Related News Stories
3 Americans share 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Associated Press
Communication pioneers win 2009 physics Nobel Reuters
Nobel awarded for advances in harnessing light New York Times
Nobel prize in physics goes to Briton who harnessed the power of light The Guardian
Fiber optics, imaging pioneers win physics Nobel NPR
Light work wins Nobel for electronics pioneers New Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to light pioneers Nature
Pioneers of fiber optics, semiconductors win Nobel NPR
3 Americans win Nobel in physics LA Times
2009 Physics Nobel Winners See the Big Picture ScienceNow
Nobel winners who probably changed your life Washington Post

Science: In the coming weeks, on the plains of Inner Mongolia, China plans to launch its first large-scale effort to capture and store carbon emissions.

A new coal-to-liquid plant in Erdos will burn coal to make, at the outset, a little over 1 million metric tons per year of diesel and other petrochemicals. Operated by China's biggest coal producer, Shenhua Group, the plant will generate as a byproduct about 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year. In an effort to make carbon capture pay, much of the gas will be sequestered in nearby oil reservoirs, where pressure from the CO2 will force hard-to-get oil to the surface.

Shenhua's plant is one of two pivotal carbon capture and storage efforts in China. The other is GreenGen, an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant that the Chinese government approved last June for construction in Tianjin.

Instead of pulverizing coal as a conventional power plant does, IGCC plants turn it into gas, which allows for easy separation of CO2 from combustible gases--and far easier CO2 capture. If successful, GreenGen could redefine how power is generated from coal in China, says Richard Morse of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "You could make a very strong case that it's the leading carbon-capture project for coal-fired power in the world," he says.

London Times Online: The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will blast two huge chunks out of the lunar surface on Friday in order to have a closer look at what the Moon is made of.

The plume will be created by dropping the Centaur upper stage of the rocket that fired LCROSS to lunar orbit onto the surface near one of the lunar poles.

When the 2.4-tonne Centaur hits the ground, it will be traveling at 2.5km per second, and throw up a plume of debris 10km high that can be analyzed by instruments on the LCROSS spacecraft.

Physics Today: An article in the London Times that suggesting the UK was considering pulling out of the CERN has caused consternation in the physics community, and denials from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), but a review of the UK's science expenditure is ongoing.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has suffered from a financial crisis caused by over-spending on some high-profile projects such as the Diamond synchrotron light source. In response, STFC has cut back some grants and support for some facilities, and is conducting a major science review through its advisory panels, and with input from the science community and STFC's international partners. The report is due in December. The STFC has "to live within constrained budgets if need be, and to diversify our funding base," says STFC's Keith Mason.

A misquoted article

The Times article misquoted the STFC's chief operating officer Richard Wade, says Mason and took other comments out of context.

The UK's agreement with CERN is governed by an international treaty, and could only be changed with UK Government approval and with consultation with the other CERN partners, it cannot be made unilaterally by the STFC alone. It was the strength of this international agreement that during the 1980s, protected the UK's particle physics community's membership of CERN but also allowed the UK to negotiate a reduction in its membership fees.

CERN membership did however, have a knock on effect of leading to cuts in other areas of UK particle physics.

A vision for today

"The STFC's position in relation to the LHC is made clear in our July vision document," says Mason, "which states that 'our highest priority in particle physics is to exploit the Large Hadron Collider at CERN'."

The vision document also says that the UK's highest priorities in ground-based astronomy is to exploit membership of the European Southern Observatory, which gives access to the Very Large Telescope and to the ALMA millimeter astronomy array, and to carry out R&D towards the next generation European Extremely Large Telescope. The UK is also heavily involved in the proposed Square Kilometer Array radio telescope.

A bleak UK budget

However, the public sector, which funds the majority of research in the UK, is expected to suffer significant cuts next year because of the recession. The ongoing science review will "ensure STFC is prudently prepared for the tougher budget environment," says Mason, and "ask tough questions about the future direction of our science and technology program, including the balance between [science] disciplines."

The consultation encompasses all of STFC's programs, and includes an examination of the cost-effectiveness of international subscriptions, including CERN, the European Southern Observatory, the ILL neutron source and others.

"All UK publicly-funded bodies have a responsibility to ensure value-for-money," says Mason, "and STFC has discussed with our international partners the need to restrain costs and, if possible, reduce expenditure."

The next few months will be challenging says Mason, "but an exciting opportunity [for STFC] to set the course for the future."

Paul Guinnessy

Nature: Two experiments that produce laser light by exploiting the collective wave-like motion of free electrons on a metal surface bring the science and technology of lasers into the realm of the nano-scale.

New Scientist: The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes will be taken apart today in an effort to solve problems with image quality.

The 1.8-metre PS1 telescope is the first of a suite of instruments—the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System - designed to find asteroids and comets with orbits that could bring them close to Earth. Sited atop a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, PS1 is the prototype for a planned four telescopes that will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times each month.

To scan so much sky, PS1 boasts a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and specially designed software to process the terabytes of data collected by the telescope each night.

But since the camera was installed in 2007, the telescope team has been struggling to get PS1's image quality to its targeted level. "There have been problems that we just didn't anticipate," says Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

NPR: In a new biography called The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, author Graham Farmelo digs deep into the archives and personal papers of a Nobel-winning physicist.

You can also read an interview of Paul Dirac through the American Institute of Physics's history center.

Oral History Transcript—Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

NYTimes.com: The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change this week are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade—after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s—is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public—and to policy makers—can be frustrating, they say.

Nature: In 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a spy walked into the US embassy in Warsaw and offered to sell the CIA the real and code names of all intelligence agents from the HVA (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung)—the foreign department of the Stasi, the East German Ministry for State Security. The CIA bought the highly sensitive information for a mere US$75,000.

The spoils—released to the Berlin Stasi archive and made available to history professor Kristie Macrakis at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 2005—have the potential to alter popular perceptions of the activities of the East German intelligence agency and secret police.

Macrakis's analysis of the CIA material reveals that about 40% of all HVA sources planted in West German companies, research institutions, and universities were stealing scientific and technical secrets.

Physics Today: Earlier this week Alan Taub became the new vice president of Research and Development for General Motors. Despite going into and out of bankruptcy, GM is still one of the largest companies in the US that conducts industrial R&D.

Taub (see left image) has run GM's eight science labs for the last nine years and was a key player in building GM's newest R&D lab in Shanghai that officially opened last month.

In his new role, Taub will still coordinate all the advanced technical work within GM, but will be more closely involved in managing GM's collaborative R&D ventures with academia, the Department of Energy, and other strategic partners.

Physics Today Online was lucky enough to ask some questions in a public webcast held on Tuesday. An edited transcript is below.

[Question]: What is the future of fuel cells within the new GM, do we have enough funds to run them?

Taub: Fuel cells are still an important activity for General Motors. And part of the solution to diversifying the energy source for vehicles. We remain committed to developing the technology but as we approach early commercialization, the costs of development are increasing.

[Question]: How do you envision the global R&D organizations work together? How will "who does what" be determined?

Taub: Working with my leadership team, we select the competencies to be developed at each of the eight R&D labs'. Multidisciplinary teams then integrate the labs programs globally to gain the most effective results. The competency selection for each site is based on availability of talent.

[Question]: Why do you believe globalization of GM's R&D activities is necessary?

Taub: Innovation and breakthrough research are enabled by diversity—diversity of education, the working environment and the local marketplace. We have been successful at having researchers located in different sites globally and bringing their ideas together so the team has more perspectives for new ideas.

[Question]: The easiest way to improve fuel efficiency is to cut down on weight. The New York Times had an article on how 60% of the weight of a car is due to steel, and how new types of steel are going into cars to provide safety and lightness. What is GM doing in this area, do you do the basic R&D yourself or do you rely on your partners?

Taub: In the past 15 years, we have dramatically changed the [steel] material mix on vehicles. For example, GM is increasing it's usage of high-strength steels to the point that in the next 10 years we will see very little low-carbon steel in the structural bodies of GM vehicles.

As well as changing the steel mix, GM is also increasing usage of aluminum and magnesium. This is accomplished by collaborations of GM and supplier engineers as well as precompetitive research with Ford and Chrysler in US.

[Question]: Battery technology seems to have significant limitations. Is GM looking at ultra-capacitors as well?

Taub: Yes, we are looking at batteries, fuel cells and ultracapacitors as energy storage devices. We see a role for each.

[Question]
Will you use the plugin technology from the canceled Saturn Vue "two-mode" hybrid in any other small SUVs in the future?

Taub: All we said so far is that the technology will go into another GM product. Stay tuned.

[Question]: To succeed, GM needs world class scientists. After bankruptcy, how does it propose to attract and retain them?

Taub: We have been successful at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to the various GM global laboratories. People are intrigued by the combination of deep technical assignments on products that make a difference to consumers everywhere.

[Question]: We've seen impressive demos on Vehicle to Vehicle communications technology from GM. What are the remaining obstacles to introducing this technology into the marketplace?

Taub: We are continuing "harden" the technology in order to enable commercialization. Because this is a safety-related technology, it must be robust. It also requires standards for all of GM's suppliers since the vehicle parts needs to interact. There is progress being made on all fronts.

[Question]: What do you see as the biggest challenge in transitioning to wide-spread electric vehicle use?

Taub: Two things. Getting the cost down and the supply base ready.

[Question]: What is your personal favorite research topic at the moment?

Taub: Clearly, it is the electrification of the vehicle. Batteries, motors, hydrogen fuel cells are dominating the research portfolio. At the same time, the connected vehicle (e.g. navigation, OnStar, infotainment) is probably the most fun because we get to implement it at consumer electronics speed.

[Question]: Do you envision GM R&D researchers doing fundamental researchers? Or do you see the researchers act as project managers, and the universities act as the actual researchers?

Taub: The answer is both. Inside GM, we have the world's best individual contributors performing leading edge research on critical automotive applications. They do their work inside our walls while collaborating with the best professors and engineers in universities and national labs.

[Question]: Can you speak to GM's R&D center in Honeoye Falls, New York, the role its played so far, and the type of role it might play moving forward?

Taub: Honeoye Falls is the site of one of our eight global laboratories. It is our main site for fuel cell stack research and more recently battery system research. It will continue to be an important element of our research infrastructure.

[Question]: How's that shape-changing NiTinol material coming along. Any production plans on the horizon?

Taub: Our first application is being deployed as we speak. I just can't tell you at this time what that vehicle is.

[Question]: I wonder what makes fuel cells expensive? It seems very affordable for a new technology. If a fuel cell car has 100 grams of platinum, which is about $3000-4000, the rest of the materials involved is not that much expensive.

Taub: There are many elements that contribute to the cost of vehicle components. Raw material is only one aspect. On the fuel cell stack, our next-generation technology dramatically reduces the platinum loading, making it competitive with that on after-treatment for internal combustion engines.

[Question]: What is the research focus of the science lab in China?

Taub: Glad you asked. I am just back from Shanghai and the jet lag is almost gone. The initial areas of attention are improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, lightweight materials and the joining technology for those materials, emerging market safety, consumer research methodologies and batteries.

[Question]: How far into the future do think it will be before we see automated cars driving on the expressway?

Taub: I'm on the record for promising limited autonomy driving on highways by 2015. This is enabled by a combination of lane keeping and stop-and-go adaptive cruise control.

[Question]: How does GM R&D foster a culture of innovation and creativity while simultaneously having researchers be accountable for their work and in tune with the overall cost of their projects?

Taub: Welcome to the challenge of leading an industrial research laboratory. We pull on our researchers to solve the tough problems facing the industry while adding to the world's scientific knowledge base. We lead the industry in patents—we filed more than 600 within R&D alone last year—and lead in technology implementation in the product.

[Question]: In your introduction you talked about "mainstreaming R&D." What does this mean and is GM allowing other employees to contribute ideas?

Taub: R&D is now fully integrated into Product Development at GM. That is allowing us to get more streamlined in our technology development and implementation activities. We are always looking for good ideas from both inside and outside the company. Feel free to contact any of our group managers, lab directors or me if you don't know who else to email.

[Question]: The development of the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles requires advancements and a deep understanding across a wide range of materials (electrode materials for batteries, catalysts for fuel cells). How do you draw the line between what GM can develop and what must be developed by others to make a particular technology successful? Basically how deep into basic research does GM want to go?

Taub: The make-buy decision is different for every technology. For example, stamping of metals for the key components of the vehicle is a core technology within GM. The plastic parts are generally purchased from suppliers. The recent decision to vertically integrated into battery pack manufacturing does not mean we would be manufacturing our own battery cells. However, we are working internally on next-generation cell technology in collaboration with various suppliers.

Various: Two earthquakes caused devastation across the Pacific earlier this week. One, based off the coast of Samoa caused a tsunami; the other, near Sumatra, was so deep that no tsunami occurred, but the loss of life on the surrounding area may be greater.

"The chances of there being a connection between these two earthquakes is extremely slim," said University of Ulster geophysicist John McCloskey, told the London Times. The 10,000 km distance between the quakes and the orientation of the tectonic plates made a causal link physically implausible, he said.

"The real danger in the coming days is that a second larger quake with a magnitude of around 8.5 could occur just off the coast of Padang," Professor McCloskey said. That could result in a huge tsunami submerging the town and surrounding coastline, which has a population of about 1.5 million.

A magnitude 6.6 event off the coast of Sumatra happened earlier today.

The tsunami earthquake

The tsunami that devastated the islands of Samoa, American Samoa, and Tonga was the result of a shallow rupture in the earth's crust on one of the most geologically active areas of the world—where the Pacific plate is plunging westward under the Australia plate at a rate of 86 mm a year.

The earthquake, which was measured as high as 8.3 on the Richter scale, occurred 190 kilometers southwest of American Samoa. The event caused one side of the fault line to push up several meters higher than the other side, according to initial estimates.

Gary Gibson, a senior seismologist at Environmental Systems and Services in Melbourne, told Australia's ABC network that the energy released in the earthquake was approximately one-thirtieth the size of the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake near the island of Sumatra, Indonesia.

Gibson also mentioned to the Sydney Morning Herald that this earthquake was unusual in that it was due to a north-east to south-west tension in the crust. "The earth [was] being stretched rather than compressed," he said.

After the earthquake, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre issued a tsunami warning for South Pacific nations, including New Zealand, which experienced a rise in sea level of 40 cm, but Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga were too close to the initial event to get enough warning.

"People who live in areas where tsunamis can occur are generally educated about them," said John Bellini, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver, Colorado. "If you feel an earthquake, get to high ground as fast as you can." In this case, he adds, "Five minutes was not enough time for emergency services to move into action."

Analysis of the data indicated that Hawaii was too far away for any major tide rise to occur.

Related Links
Map of the two earthquakes
Sumatra and Samoa earthquakes were inside the 'Ring of Fire' fault lines London Times
Samoan tsunami caused by 'shallow quake'
When two plates collide: rupture set off wave Sydney Morning Herald
Tsunami forecasts quicker, more accurate Honolulu Advertiser
Tsunami warning system unable to help Samoans Inside Science

Science: After spending nearly 2 decades developing China's first space-based observatory, Li Tipei now fears that the project may never get off the ground.

The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) mission is scheduled for launch next year, but with the clock running down, Science has learned that no government agency has stepped forward to pay the estimated US$146 million to build the satellite—putting the mission in jeopardy.

"It would be a shame for the Chinese scientific community if the project dies prematurely," says Li, an astrophysicist and chief mission scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) and Tsinghua University.