Science: The rise of nanotechnology is garnering much attention for its ability to construct objects with individual atoms and molecules, at a scale roughly a billion times smaller than the objects we encounter in our everyday lives. In parallel to nanotechnology's often astonishing achievements, scientists have started to build a capacity to do useful work on an even more minute scale. During the past decade, chemists and physicists have begun a fabrication process at the scale of the atomic nuclei. It is an emergent means of producing, in sufficient quantities, "designer" atomic nuclei, which are new, rare isotopes with unusual numbers of neutrons or protons, or unusual decay modes (1). There are several reasons why a latent demand exists within the scientific community for new isotopes. One is that the properties of particular isotopes often hold the key to understanding some aspect of nuclear science. Another is that the rate of certain nuclear reactions involving rare isotopes can be important for modeling astronomical objects. Finally, the pursuit of ever more exotic isotopes sometimes advances basic understanding of the nuclear landscape, along with unexpected areas of application.
Argus Leader: Most South Dakotans probably don't either, but as the Sanford Underground Lab at Homestake takes the first concrete steps toward operations, people in the Black Hills and the rest of the state might get better acquainted with scientific concepts such as "dark matter." About 350 scientists gathered in Lead recently to begin outlining some of the first groups of experiments.
American Journal of Physics: String theorist Moataz H. Emam briefly discusses the accomplishments of string theory that would survive a complete falsification of the theory as a model of nature; and argues that such an event suggests that string theory should become its own discipline, independent of both physics and mathematics.
Science: Laser technology is present in our daily lives through literally thousands of applications, including surgical instruments, CD and DVD players, optical fiber communications, and even supermarket barcode readers. Despite the fast pace of laser research, the design of most laser devices relies on assumptions in the underlying theory that have barely changed since the early days of laser theory (1). However, this situation is problematic for two reasons. First, the rapid advance of nanofabrication techniques has led to the development of completely new lasing systems whose description falls outside the scope of conventional laser theory. Of these, random lasers (2) are perhaps the most challenging example. Second, more general models could enable the design of substantially different classes of lasers. With their contribution in this week's Science magazine, Türeci, Rotter and Stone have substantially changed this picture. By developing a new theory in which the main properties of a laser can be physically understood as the result of strong nonlinear interactions between lasing modes, they have provided a substantially broader perspective of laser physics that unifies the physical description of many possible laser structures.
Related Article
Strong Interactions in Multimode Random Lasers Science 2 May 2008: Vol. 320. no. 5876, pp. 643 - 646
Physics Today: Faster moving ships hit the whales, causing injury or death, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet for over a year the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has blocked the National Marine Fisheries Service from issuing a rule based on scientific research that limits the speed of ships near US ports to protect the endangered right whale.
 According to documents obtained by the House of representative committee on oversight and government reform (OGR), the delay appears to be based on objections raised by Whitehouse officials and the Vice President's office. Under Executive order 12866, the OIRA is supposed to complete their review of rule changes within 90 days and can only extend the review period by an additional 30 days.
According to Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who recently sent a letter to the administration requesting an explanation, the Vice President's office is objecting to NOAA's research as the Vice President's staff "contends that we have no evidence that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference."
In a memo obtained by the OGR committee NOAA rejected these objections, stating that both a statistical analysis of ship strike records and the peer-reviewed literature justified the final rule. NOAA reported that there is "no basis to overturn our previous conclusion that imposing a speed limit on large vessels would be beneficial to whales."
Waxman says that he questions "why White House economic advisors are apparently conducting their own research on right whales and why the Vice President's staff is challenging the conclusions of the government's scientific experts. The appearance is that the White House rejects the conclusions of its own scientists and peer-reviewed scientific studies because it does not like the policy implications of the data. This is not how the review process is supposed to work."
Nature News: How does our classical world emerge from the counterintuitive principles of quantum theory? Can we even be sure that the world doesn't 'go quantum' when no one is watching? Philip Ball talks to the theorists and experimentalists trying to find out
The Sunday Times: A fusion laboratory designed to recreate the temperatures and pressures inside the sun could be built in Oxfordshire under plans being drawn up by British scientists The aim is to build the world’s most powerful lasers and use them to blast tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel to create energy. The process could, say the researchers, be a partial solution to the world’s energy crisis, offering a source of safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radio-active waste. “The aim is to destroy matter by turning it into pure energy,” said Dr John Collier, head of the high power laser programme (HiPER) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which was launched last week. “This is the same process that powers the stars. Our task is to find how to control it to offer humanity a new source of energy.” HiPER, would place Britain at the forefront of research on nuclear fusion, now enjoying a global revival after decades of neglect. The Rutherford laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is seen as the most likely site.
msnbc.com: One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.
Nature News: A dozen of cosmology’s brightest minds, including British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, descended on the Cook’s Branch Conservancy in Montgomery County, Texas, last week to discuss the tricky problems of the early Universe. These physicists, most of whom are connected in some way to Hawking, either as collaborators or past graduate students at the University of Cambridge, UK, arrived for the invitation-only retreat, which, in its second year, has become one of the most exclusive — and pampered — workshops in physics. The 23-square-kilometre property is owned by George Mitchell, an 88-year-old developer and oilman worth US$3.2 billion. Late in life, Mitchell has cultivated a love for astrophysics, bestowing $50 million on Texas A&M University in College Station. “I am trying to see how our top universities can have as much influence in high-level physics as, say, Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, or Harvard or Yale,” Mitchell explains. “And I am trying to see how we can get in on the act, because this state is big enough and wealthy enough to get it done.”
The Guardian: Creating a theory of everything is the greatest intellectual challenge ever attempted by scientists. But with every breakthrough comes another hurdle, says Robert Matthews.
Science: First the bedroom clock reassures you that you're right on schedule. Moments later, the kitchen clock tells you that you're running minutes behind. If you find that annoying, pity the geochronologists. For decades, two of their workhorse timepieces--isotopic clocks ticking to the steady decay of two different radioactive elements--have been disagreeing by millions of years. Now geochronologists have recalibrated one of the clocks, bringing it into agreement with the other. They've tried it before, but this time it looks like the fix will stick. "This is a huge step forward," says geochronologist Mike Villeneuve of the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. "You'd like to see it reproduced, but it looks very solid to me." The synchronization of clocks lends more support to a link between huge volcanic eruptions and mass extinctions.
BBC News: An observatory has opened in an area of Northumberland recognised as having the least light pollution in England. The £450,000 Kielder Observatory will offer astronomers views of the universe uncluttered by intruding light from towns and cities. The timber structure is perched on a hilltop location on Black Fell and was chosen because the area is famous for having the darkest skies in England. It is hoped the observatory will be popular with professional and amateurs. The Kielder Observatory has been funded by the Northumberland Strategic Partnership with help from regeneration agency One NorthEast, the European Regional Development Fund and the Northern Rock Foundation.
Nature News: Battling rumours of death beams and mind control, an ionosphere research facility in Alaska called HAARP finally brings science to the fore. Sharon Weinberger reports.
Nature News: Physicists in Italy claimed last week to have seen particles of dark matter. Their announcement has got their rivals riled and raises questions about what constitutes evidence of a new particle. Rita Bernabei of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Rome presented her team's latest results on 16 April at an international meeting of particle physicists in Venice, Italy. Their detector, DAMA/LIBRA (Dark Matter Large Sodium Iodide Bulk for Rare Processes), located deep under the country's Gran Sasso mountain, seems to be observing dark matter, Bernabei says. Most agree that the experiment is picking up something: “They're seeing a signal, there's no doubt about that,” says Tim Sumner of Imperial College London. But despite this, critics say that they don't believe the detector has found the elusive particles. “For me, it's not proof that they have seen dark matter,” says Gilles Gerbier, a physicist at the Centre for Atomic Energy in Saclay, France. He adds that he's stumped by what's causing the signal.
Los Angeles Times: In the more than a century since 'perfect' platinum-iridium cylinders were first used as the world's kilogram standards, their weights have mysteriously fluctuated. Scientists are rethinking what the measure means.
Space.com: Experts took part in a special panel "Forging the Future of Space Science: The Next 50 Years," held at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The discussion is part of an international public seminar series, marking the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year that launched science into space. The colloquia series is organized by the Space Studies Board, a research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. Leonard David describes some of the conclusions reached at the syposium at space.com
Science: Earth is a complex system in which many biological and physical components interact across all space and time scales. To understand this system, earth scientists have traditionally built large, multi-component models. However, it is difficult to know when such a model has become sufficiently detailed for its task and how confident one can be in its predictions. In a generic linear system with feedbacks, Roe and Baker have shown that normally distributed feedbacks give rise to a highly skewed distribution of responses, similar to those seen for climate sensitivity in ensembles of global models. Even relatively narrow ranges of uncertainty in the feedbacks can be amplified in the response. Thus, besides refining the feedback uncertainties in traditional earth system models, scientists and policy-makers must explore complementary approaches to modeling.
Reuters: China will complete a new research station in the interior of Antarctica next year, state media said on Sunday, expanding its presence on the continent. The official Xinhua news agency cited Sun Bo, head of the Chinese Antarctic expedition team, as saying that an expedition to start in November would build the main structure of the new station situated on Dome A, the highest point on the continent at 4,093 meters above sea level. The country's third scientific research station on the continent, it is expected to be finished by next January, Xinhua cited Sun as saying after returning from the country's 24th scientific expedition there.
New York Times: For a decade, the scientists have argued that the storied liner went down fast after hitting an iceberg because the ship’s builder used substandard rivets that popped their heads and let tons of icy seawater rush in. More than 1,500 people died. When the safety of the rivets was first questioned 10 years ago, the builder ignored the accusation and said it did not have an archivist who could address the issue. Now, historians say new evidence uncovered in the archive of the builder, Harland and Wolff, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, settles the argument and finally solves the riddle of one of the most famous sinkings of all time. The company says the findings are deeply flawed.
The Independent: Peter Higgs, 78, is modesty personified. A theoretical particle physicist, it took him 20 years before he could even bring himself to call the so-called God particle by its more scientific name – the Higgs boson. Up to that point, he preferred the more prosaic term, "scalar boson".
The Higgs is just one of the discoveries that the Large Hadron Collider is expected to make. The international team of physicists behind the project believes that the LHC will almost certainly produce a jewel box of discoveries that will light up the infinitesimally small world of sub-atomic physics.
"The actual discovery of the Higgs boson, if it happens, is only one part of the programme. There is vastly more for the machine to do," Higgs said. "I'm most excited for instance about the possible identification of super-symmetry particles – symmetrical particles of the particles we already know".
Wired.com: A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.
New Scientist: A small-scale nuclear war between India and Pakistan would have wide-scale impact outside of the region by destroying most of the ozone layer, leaving the DNA of humans and other organisms at risk of damage from the Sun's rays, says Michael Mills of the University of Colorado at Boulder, US, and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Their research is based on computer simulations in which each country launches 50 devices of 15 kilotons, roughly half the available warheads each side possesses.
Mills and colleagues found that a regional nuclear war in South Asia would deplete up to 40% of the ozone layer in the mid latitudes and up to 70% in the high northern latitudes.
"The models show this magnitude of ozone loss would persist for five years, and we would see substantial losses continuing for at least another five years," says Mills.
The effect is far greater than was calculated in the 1980s in a study that modelled the effect of global nuclear war. Mills says old models did not take into account the impact of columns of soot that would rise up to 80 kilometres into the atmosphere.
ScienceNews: Two mathematicians, Ce Bian and Andrew Booker of the University of Bristol in England, now have the first glimpse of an elusive mathematical object that may one day help crack the key to the distribution of the prime numbers. They have found the first example of a third-degree transcendental L-function.
Science: The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) based in China is designed to peer deeper into space and measure more spectral emissions than the project that inspires it, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
 Engineers this month are installing LAMOST's eyes and optic nerves: 1-meterwide hexagonal sections of its two mirrors and the 4000 optical fibers on its focal surface that will feed starlight into a battalion of spectrographs. Viewing conditions at Xinglong, in China's industrialized north, are not ideal: Independent experts say that siting the scope in western China would have been better. Every week, dust and sand blown in from the Gobi Desert have to be brushed off the correcting mirror. On the bright side, Xinglong, in the foothills of the Yanshan Mountains, gets an average of 270 clear nights of viewing each year. The whole system--which has cost $40 million so far to build--should be in place by fall, when final testing will begin, says LAMOST's chief engineer, Cui Xiangqun, director of Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology. Data collection should begin in earnest next year.
Science: "It's all a mush in my mind," said Michael Carr, talking about early Mars. That's quite a concession from one of the world's most experienced Mars geologists. After 10 hours of discussion on the state of early Mars, "it's frustrating," he said when asked to sum up a small premeeting workshop.* "Despite the beautiful data we've seen, we're no closer to understanding what [early Mars] climate was. And if it was warm and wet, what caused it to be warm and wet?"
Carr, who has been studying Mars since the early 1970s at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, wrote the book on Mars. Actually, he wrote two of them: Water on Mars and The Surface of Mars. But that wasn't enough to sort out 40 years of data, much of it still coming from two rovers and two orbiters. The workshop focused on the first period of martian geologic history, called the Noachian--when water flowed on the surface, at least at times--and the transition into the Hesperian, a colder, drier time preceding the bone-dry deep-freeze of the past 3 billion years.
Salon.com: Global warming demands more than do-gooder actions. It demands "geoengineering" -- like blocking the sun's rays with stratospheric dirt.
Physics Update: Light can be thought of as a series of waves or, in the dualistic view of reality prescribed by quantum science, as a collection of quanta, particle-like parcels of light energy referred to as photons. At any place along a light beam there may be many photons present or in special cases just one. Creating single photons is not easy to do. It is possible to make photons in pairs by sending laser light through special crystals. Even a pure-color laser beam will consist of many photons; but occasionally one of these photons will be “down converted,” that is, will turn into two photons each with half the energy of the original photon. When a pair has been created, the detection of one of these half-energy photons heralds the presence of its twin.
Furthermore, these photons are entangled, meaning that the properties of one photon are inextricably linked to those of its partner and detecting one can ruin the quantum state of the other. By minimizing these quantum correlations, the researchers obtained heralded photons with exceptionally high quality and short duration.
In the experiment the pairs of photons made had a central wavelength of about 830 nm, at the border between visible and near-infrared light. Each of these photons was (in units of time) about 65 femtoseconds (65 x 10-15 sec) long. In units of space, they were about 20 microns long. The shortest previously produced single photon was about 1picosecond (10-12 sec) long. Even shorter pulses of light—stretching only hundreds of attoseconds—have been made, but these pulses consist of many photons. One of the researchers, Peter Mosley of Oxford Universty, says that this new experiment represents the first time that textbook photons-identical, localized wavepackets containing a single quantum of energy-have been produced in a lab.
Associated Press: Avraham Trakhtman, a mathematician at Bar-Ilan University who worked as a labourer after emigrating from Russia to Israel, has succeeded in solving the elusive so-called road colouring problem.
The conjecture, posed by Adler, Goodwiyn and Weiss over 38 years ago, assumes that it is possible to create a "universal map" that would direct people to arrive at a certain destination, at the same time, regardless of their original location.
Related Links
Avraham Trakhtman
The road coloring problem, Israel J. of Math
The road coloring problem (ArXiv)
A history of the Road coloring conjecture (Wikipedia)
Wired: Trying to pin down how much the Defense Department is spending on space combat research -- and on what projects -- is difficult. The programs are spread across at least a dozen different accounts; much of the technology involved is "dual use" -- meaning, it could help with another military matters, too; and that's before you get into the Defense Department's "black," classified budget.
According to the Center for Defense Information, the Pentagon will spend at minimum $520 million in the 2009 budget on research that could lead to arms in space.
ASPERA: How do you ship a magnet weighing more than 1000 tons (the equivalent of the take-off weight of four Boeing 747s) from Europe to Japan? Partly by breaking it up into smaller pieces say physicists from CERN who have donated the NOMAD magnet and other related equipment to Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization KEK. In January, 35 containers were filled with 150 pieces for a long voyage by truck, train and boat.
The equipment, worth millions of dollars, will be used in the T2K (Tokai to Kamiokande) experiment that will start operation in the autumn of 2009. The J-PARC accelerators at Tokai will send a 40 GeV proton beam to a target to produce an intense low-energy neutrino beam directed towards Super-Kamiokande, Japan’s neutrino observatory 300 km away. “We hope that it will be the most intense neutrino beam ever produced” says André Rubbia from the ETH Institute for particle physics of Zurich.
The beam will look to see if the neutrinos oscillate between the three types of neutrino. To date, only the first two of the three mixing angles have been measured precisely. The T2K experiment will attempt to determine the third, which is the “Holy Grail” for neutrino physicists.
USA Today: President Bush has failed to back up his broad vision to revive the nation's interest in space exploration with adequate funding or even public support, a leading scientist told lawmakers.
"The money that was promised to execute the mission has not been provided, and it's hard to say that the vision has generated much excitement, particularly among the young, who are expected to benefit the most," said Lennard Fisk, chairman of the National Research Council Space Studies Board.
Christian Science Monitor: Concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It's a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. "There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions]," says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
Italy's Italcemente is the world's fifth-largest cement producer. It is looking beyond reducing CO2 emissions by creating a cement that actually breaks down airborne pollutants by adding titanium dioxide, which, in the presence of sunlight, acts as a photocatalyer, hastening the decomposition of such pollutants as nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides, and ozone.
Ulm points out that the structure of human bones, at the molecular level, is similar to that of concrete. While cement must be heated to 1,200 degrees C (2,200 degrees F.) before it achieves strength and structure, bone is formed at 37 degrees C (98.6 degrees F.).
"That makes one think that nature can create at 37 Celsius a material that has similar properties as cement," Ulm says. "Can we mimic that?"
Rensselaer: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have spent months running supercomputer simulations on the key characteristics of both copper nanowires and carbon nanotube bundles. It is the first such study to examine copper nanowire using quantum mechanics rather than empirical laws.
The research team concluded that the carbon nanotube bundles boasted a much smaller electrical resistance than the copper nanowires. This lower resistance suggests carbon nanotube bundles would therefore be better suited for interconnect applications.
The Tech Herald: A fast-travelling meteorite which struck a region near the Peruvian/Bolivian border in September 2007, should according to standard theory, have disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere long before reaching the ground.
The fact that the rock meteorite didn't perform as expected and instead crashed to earth leaving a deep 49-foot-wide (15 meter) crater, means scientists must now rethink their meteorite theories, said Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University in Rhode Island.
Related links
Press release from Brown University
ScienceNow: Efforts to wean America's automobiles off gasoline are running into the law of unintended consequences. Methanol wears out engine components, and corn-based ethanol has squeezed corn supplies. Even bypassing liquid fuel altogether may be problematic: New research suggests that flooding the roads with plug-in vehicles could cause a significant, though potentially manageable, drain on regional water sources.
Space.com: NASA is facing the prospect of trying to explore deep space without the aid of the long-lasting nuclear batteries it has relied upon for decades to send spacecraft to destinations where sunlight is in short supply.
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin told a House Appropriations subcommittee March 5 that the U.S. inventory of plutonium-238 - the radioactive material essential for building long-lasting batteries known to the experts as radioisotope power systems - is running out quickly.
"Looking ahead, plutonium is in short supply," Griffin told lawmakers during the first of two days of hearings on the U.S. space agency's 2009 budget request.
Though Griffin did not mention it, the U.S. Department of Energy over the winter quietly shelved long-standing plans to resume domestic production of plutonium-238. In 2005, the Department of Energy (DOE) gave public notice of its intent to consolidate the nation's radioisotope power system activities at Idaho National Laboratory and start producing plutonium-238 there by 2011.
Restarting production was projected at the time to cost $250 million and take five years. Those plans are now on hold. "DOE did not request funding in 2009 for [Plutonium-238] production, since NASA has been directed to fund any new production capabilities," Angela Hill, an Energy Department spokeswoman told to space.com. "Production may or may not resume based on NASA's decision. Based on current mission plans, DOE will only continue to provide new Radioisotope Power Systems until 2015."
NASA's 2009 budget request includes no money for re-establishing the Department of Energy's long dormant plutonium-238 production capability.
Science: NASA says it is willing to fly a $1.5 billion experiment designed to detect antimatter. But Congress would have to come up with as much as $4 billion to make it happen, the agency says. Supporters of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) dispute those cost estimates but face an uphill struggle to get the 7000-kg probe into orbit.
In a 17-page report to Congress that was released two weeks ago, NASA paints a sobering picture of what it would take to attach the instrument to the international space station. Samuel Ting, the physics Nobelist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has championed the project, says the 16-nation AMS collaboration has no money to buy another ride into space.
Related Physics Today article
NASA cancels science flight, ditches international partners (May 2007, page 30)
Nature: The €10-billion (US$15-billion) international fusion reactor ITER could be damaged by violent bursts of energy called edge localized modes (ELM) that are expected to rocket out of inner plasma core, unless a proposed solution is implemented, says Rick Moyer, a plasma physicist at the University of California, San Diego. A proposed solution will be put Norbert Holtkamp, the project's construction leader on the 18 March. It is expected to call for a complex arrangement of magnets to dampen the effects of the ELMs. Solving the problem is proving to be controversial, as any solution will cost and delay the already over-budgeted project further.
The Guardian: A study of nearly 65,000 nuclear industry workers over more than 60 years has found a possible link between high radiation exposure and heart disease. The finding was particularly surprising since there is no established biological mechanism that would explain how radiation exposure might cause heart disease. However, the research team stressed that its analysis could not rule out other factors that could explain the link, such as work-related stress or irregular shift patterns.
Reuters: Engineers have fitted the last major piece into what they claim is the world's largest scientific instrument – the nuclear particle accelerator filling a 27km (17-mile) circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border. "It's exciting, but at the same time there is a feeling of relief," said Robert Aymar, the French director general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. 
Science: As a legendary designer of communications satellites, Harold Rosen doesn't need to spend his ninth decade figuring out how to land a cheap probe that can maneuver and send back pictures from the moon's surface. But when Google announced last year that it was joining with the nonprofit X Prize Foundation to sponsor the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, the National Medal of Technology winner decided to dust off an idea for a tubular, spinning payload that had been "in the back of my head" for decades. "We think we have the team to win it, and we're raring to go," says Rosen, who believes he can do for $20 million.
Washington Post: In late January, the $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source's linear accelerator produced a proton beam that reached 310 kilowatts, nearly doubling the 183-kilowatt record reached by the facility in August last year. The previous best record–163-kilowatt– was held by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. The beam strikes a mercury target and creates a stream of subatomic neutrons that are used to study the structure and dynamics of materials.
Related Links
Tenn. neutron accelerator sets record (8/31/2007)
Spallation Neutron Source is powered up (5/1/2006)
Spallation Neutron Source
Scenta: A French team of physicists have recently succeeded in trapping a single photon in a box on the time scale of seconds and have detected this photon many times without destroying it.
Reuters: Anyone who has heard the snap of a rubber band breaking knows it's time to reach for a replacement.
But a group of French scientists have made a self-healing rubber band material that can reclaim its stretchy usefulness by simply pressing the broken edges back together for a few minutes.
Reuters: U.S. physicists have made a clock so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years, a finding sure to please even the most punctually minded.
 Physics Today: Microsoft Research, a division of Microsoft Corporation, has announced plans to open a new research lab near M.I.T in Cambridge, Mass this July. The new research center, called Microsoft Research New England, will be headed by mathematical physicist Jennifer Tour Chayes. Her husband Christian Borgs, will be the deputy managing director. Both researcher will be transferred from Microsoft's redmond campus in Washington state.
“Chayes is one of the most accomplished researchers in her field, and her qualifications and achievements make her the ideal leader for our newest research lab,”says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. “We’re going to New England to break through barriers between core computer science and social sciences and to do fundamental research that can lead to deeper insights and better computing experiences in an increasingly online world," says Chayes.
Microsoft Research currently has more than 800 doctoral researchers and labs in Redmond, Wash.; Beijing, China; Cambridge, UK; Bangalore, India; and Silicon Valley, Cal.
Related Links
Interview with Jennifer Chayes and Christian Borgs
Jennifer Tour Chayes
Christian Borgs
NPR (audio): Michele Norris talks to Zwerdling about what the pole looks like, why scientists flock to the bottom of the Earth — and just what it takes to stay warm in wind-chill temperatures nearing 50 degrees below zero.
BBC: The "darkest ever" substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory.
The New York Times: A bizarre scenario takes theories of modern cosmology to the limit.
ZDNet: A research collaboration between La Trobe University's Centre for Technology Infusion (CTI), Peregrine Semiconductor Australia (PSA) and the CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) have come up with a new chip design they hope will be integrated into the world's largest radio telescope.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" »
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.
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.
Science Online: Physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets
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