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APS Physics: Most metrics of a scientist’s impact in a field, like the h-index, rely primarily on the number of times his or her papers have been cited, and can miss the more subtle ways that knowledge and credit for this research spread among scientists.

Filippo Radicchi, Santo Fortunato, Benjamin Markines, and Alessandro Vespignani are instead proposing a way to rank scientists that reflects the diffusion of scientific credit in time.

Their method, based on an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank, takes into account several nontrivial effects such as the fact that being cited by an important author has more influence than being cited by one who is less well known.

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Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists

Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.

But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.

Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.

For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift when entire preexisting eastern institutes were closed or cut to a fraction of their original size.

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Big dreams come true
Aufbau Ost: Max Planck's East German experiment

WSJ.com: The H1-B visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier US technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of 25 September—nearly six months after the US government began accepting applications—only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

In addition to the weak economy, companies have curbed applications in the face of rising costs associated with hiring foreign-born workers.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the US work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft's patent applications in the US came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

Physics Today: At a packed auditorium at the Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the future festival held at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo, Canada, a panel of physicists was asked to respond to a single question: "What keeps you awake at night?"

The responses ranged from Why this universe? What is everything made of? How does complexity happen? Will string theory ever be proved correct? What is reality really? to How far can physics take us?

USA Today: Ever since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which gave federally funded university researchers the right to license their inventions as a way to spur innovation and economic growth, technology transfer offices have sprung up all over, with steady growth.

In 1991, US universities filed 1,335 patents and received $130 million in royalties. In 2005, they filed 9,306 patents and received $1.8 billion in royalties.

At some universities, the policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university.

But contracts researchers have with industry may be worded slightly differently and state an inventor "will assign and do hereby assign" his or her rights to the funder, which can lead to court cases arising over who owns the innovation rights.

Related news story
Painful lesson on patents Inside Higher Ed

Various: In a talk entitled Higgs, dark matter and supersymmetry, what the Large Hadron Collider will tell us, given to science writers attending the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing’s annual symposium, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin gave his opinion of what the LHC will discover.

The LHC will eventually attain sufficient energy to produce the Higgs boson, he says, but evidence of supersymmetry is a much more speculative possibility.

"If the Congress had not had the imbecility to cancel the Superconducting Super Collider [in 1993], it would have been discovered long ago here in Texas," says Weinberg in comments reported by Tom Siegfried of Science News.

"Many of us are terrified that the LHC will discover a Higgs particle and nothing more," Weinberg said. That would just confirm the standard model, which everybody believes already. It would not point the way to further progress in solving a deeper problem that physics faces—how to add gravity to the unified theory of the other forces.

Peter Woit of "Not Even Wrong" says that what he found interesting about Weinberg’s talk was that, "whatever Weinberg’s views on more speculative theories in physics such as extra dimensions or string theory landscape, he decided not to mention these at all in his talk."

"As a result, both questioners wanted to ask Weinberg about string theory, which he hadn’t talked about, not about the solid science he did talk about," says Woit.

String theory or superstring theory, is one of the candidates for unifying all the forces in the universe into one theory.

If the LHC creates new particles generated by supersymmetry, then clues to what makes up the bulk of dark matter in the universe would be found, which may give some tangible evidence to whether string theory is correct.

But string theory to this point has not produced a cohesive and clear guide to testing its fit with all the observable features of physical existence. Weinberg said:

"It’s developed mathematically, but not to the point where there is any one theory, or to the point that even if we had one theory we would know how to do calculations to predict things like the mass of the electron, or the masses of the quarks. So, I would say, although there has been theoretical progress... I find it disappointing. One of the hopes would be that the LHC would provide a clue to something we’re missing in superstring theory and I think that supersymmetry is the most likely place to look."

"One of the troubles with superstring theory is that although in a sense the theorists think there is only one theory, there are an infinite number of approximate solutions of it and we don’t know which one corresponds to our world. But at least in a large variety of the solutions of superstring theory there is supersymmetry visible at low energies, and if we see supersymmetry at low energies, superstring theorists may be able to derive from it some kind of clue as to how to solve these theories. But I haven’t talked about it in this lecture because I don’t see how that would work... I mean I couldn’t say that it was likely with any degree of sincerity, and certainly the LHC and any other accelerator that we can imagine being built will not get up to energies which are high enough so that we can directly see the structures that are described by superstring theory, the strings or the D-branes or whatever it is. Those will not be accessible at the LHC, so any clue we get will be very indirect."

"I myself, well I was working on superstring theory in the 80s and gave it up because... I moved into cosmology, which in the last couple of decades has had the excitement that elementary particle physics had in the 60s and 70s, a wonderful coming together of theory and observation. Cosmology now reminds me of the excitement that I felt when I was younger and doing particle physics... and it’s a pity that superstring hasn’t developed better. I still think it’s the best hope we have, I don’t know of anything else. My own work very recently has been trying to develop an alternative to superstring theory as a way of making sense out of quantum gravity at very high energies. But even though I’m working on this I still find superstring theory more attractive, but not attractive enough…"

Nature: Science communication today remains firmly wedded to its print origins says Cameron Neylon in Nature and yet there are opportunities that could "allow scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web."

...Beyond ease of delivery, we take very little advantage of the potential of the World Wide Web to transform the way we store and transfer knowledge. We rarely take the opportunity to update material with new data, or to provide a record of how a document or data set has changed.

...Very few companies worldwide have both the expertise and resources to take on the task of stitching [scientific data] together. So it is with great interest that I have watched Google develop its product, Google Wave.

Neylon points out that Google Wave documents can use automated agents that can "look through your paper checking for Protein Data Bank codes or gene names, for example, and putting in links to the [associated] databases."

These agents can also help create a dashboard in your inbox to monitor and control instruments in the lab.

Google Wave also has version control, that notes every change to a data or record collection.

"This would allow a reader to step through an analysis to see where conclusions have come from, and would make detecting fraud —or honest mistakes—much easier," he says.

Physics Today: Johns Hopkins University is again the leading US academic institution in total research and development spending for the 30th year in a row, according to a new the latest annual NSF Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges.

The total funding ranking includes research support not only from federal agencies, but also from foundations, industry and other sources.

The university pulled in $1.68 billion in medical, science and engineering research in fiscal 2008, half of which was based at the Applied Physics Laboratory. Since NSF changed its methodology in 1979 to include spending by the Applied Physics Laboratory in the university’s totals, the university has remained top of the list.

APL employs 4,300 people working specifically on some 400 R&D projects with annual funding of about $800 million.

The institutions ranked second through fifth—University of California at San Francisco; University of Wisconsin at Madison; University of Michigan and UCLA—all reported spending in the $800 million to $900 million range.

Top of the federal list

Johns Hopkins also ranked first on the NSF’s separate list of federally funded research and development, spending $1.42 billion in FY2008 on research supported by NSF, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

"More than half of our annual expenditures is invested in research," said Lloyd Minor, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at Johns Hopkins. "Our success in attracting external research support is a testament to the talent, dedication and leadership of the faculty, staff and students."

In FY2010, positions on the list may change slightly due to the heavy investment in R&D as part of the administration's billion dollar stimulus package.

Virginia Tech dropped from 42nd to 46th out of 679 universities, not because of a lack of funding—which increased by $7 million to $373 million in 2008—, but because funding increased more dramatically at other institutions.

"While our overall growth was below our goals, the areas that account for competitive research awards continued to grow," said Robert Walters, vice president for research. "We increased our external federal funding by more than 5 percent and our industry funding by almost 20 percent. In the current economy, those numbers are encouraging."

Paul Guinnessy

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: 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.

NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.

But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.

Nature News: Iranian researchers say they are dismayed and angered that a 2009 paper coauthored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran's science minister, appears to have plagiarized a 2002 paper published in Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics by South Korean researchers. The similarities between the articles were revealed by Nature. Iranian scientists say they intend to press for an examination of the allegations, and for the minister's resignation—should wrongdoing be established.

Anthony Doyle, publishing editor for the Springer journal Engineering with Computers, in which the paper was published, also told Nature that the journal will label it as "retracted" online, and include an erratum in the next issue drawing attention to the matter. "Springer takes plagiarism very seriously."

The affair has been widely picked up among Iranian researchers' e-mail networks, blogs, and some political news websites in Iran.

ScienceNOW: Objects with opposite electric charges—positive and negative—attract each other. But a new observation puts a twist on this concept.

Oppositely charged droplets of liquid mutually attract, yet those with a whole lot of charge bounce off each other. The findings could cause a rethinking of some important industrial processes, such as the electrostatic separation of water from crude oil.

BBC News: Less than two months before the scheduled launch of Russia's flagship planetary spacecraft, officials are set to recommend a delay until 2011.

The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to land on the Martian moon Phobos to collect soil samples and return them to Earth.

Sources within the Russian space industry gave RussianSpaceWeb.com details of the likely postponement.

The Russian space agency Roscosmos is expected to announce the mission's fate within a week.

The agency's decision will be based on results of testing which the spacecraft has been undergoing since July at its assembly facility at NPO Lavochkin in Khimki, near Moscow.

A delay for Phobos-Grunt would also affect China's first Mars probe Yinghuo 1, as the two craft are due to be launched together on the same Zenit rocket.

NYTimes.com: In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.

The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.

Science: China was late to join the race to develop novel rare-earth materials. "We lag behind the world in applications," says Xu Guangxian of Peking University, a chemist who was detained by the Red Guard in the late 1960s before becoming a pioneer in separating rare earths from other minerals. But Western observers agree that China is catching up fast in areas such as fuel cells and magnetic refrigeration, thanks in part to research efforts now happening here at the Baotou Research Institute of Rare Earths (BRIRE). "Absolutely, they are gaining ground," says Clint Cox, an analyst at The Anchor House, a rare earths consulting firm in Chicago, Illinois. Today, about three-quarters of the world's neodymium magnets are made in China. Domestic industrial demand is rising: Last year, China consumed 60% of all processed rare earths.

That unnerves some industry analysts and US legislators, who have expressed concern about China's dominance of the rare-earth supply. Last year, China satisfied 95% of global demand--now about 125,000 tons per year—and holds more than half of all proven reserves. In the 1990s, China's cheap production costs sent prices plummeting, driving many non-Chinese rare-earth mines out of business. Prices started creeping up in 2005, however, when China began to limit production and slap export tariffs on some rare earths. In a policy paper last month, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology floated the idea of prohibiting export of three scarcer rare earths--europium, terbium, and dysprosium.

If the Chinese government were to implement such a policy, that "would be a big problem for other countries," says Judith Chegwidden, managing director of Roskill Information Services Ltd., a mining analysis company in London. China has a "natural monopoly" over heavier rare earths, she says, simply because few mines elsewhere have ample reserves.

The Daily Telegraph: US scientists are trying to map the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons in order to reduce the amount of fuel used by spacecraft. The Genesis spacecraft used this technique in 2004 to cut its fuel load by a factor of ten.

Depicted by computer graphics, the optimal journey pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Virginia Tech's Shane Ross said: "I like to think of [these tubes] as being similar to ocean currents, but they are gravitational currents."

"If you're in a parking orbit round the Earth, and one of them intersects your trajectory, you just need enough fuel to change your velocity and now you're on a new trajectory that is free."

"It's not the same as a [gravitational] slingshot," said Ross. "Slingshots don't put you in orbit round a moon, whereas this does."

Wired.com: Tipping points are found in ecosystems, economies, and even bodies. But they're usually recognized in retrospect, when it's too late for anything but regret.

Now a growing body of research suggests there are telltale mathematical signals. If scientists can figure out how to detect them, they may be able to forecast tipping points ahead of time.

"We are repeatedly blindsided by disasters that come out of the blue. If we had better tools for anticipating those events, we could avoid some of them," said Steve Carpenter, a University of Washington ecologist.

WSJ.com: In a vault beneath the British Library, Jeremy Leighton John, the library's first curator of eManuscripts, grapples with a formidable historical challenge.

How to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today's discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder: Scientists who collaborate via e-mail, Google, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them.

Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

"It would be tragic if there were no record of lives that were so influential," John says.

Related Link
The future of saving our past Nature

NYTimes.com: International Battery, a small start-up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is developing a battery that is smaller than a cereal box but with nearly the energy of a conventional car battery.

This summer the Obama administration announced how it will distribute some $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to companies that make such advanced batteries for hybrid or all-electric vehicles and related components. International Battery is vying for a modest chunk of it.

The hope is that the grants will spur far higher levels of experimentation and production, pushing down the costs that have prevented these batteries from entering the mass market.

Science: One group of intrepid theorists thinks the answer to that question may be "yes," and if they're right, one argument in favor of string theory unravels.

2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: Joseph Lykken of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory describes the many ways in which particle accelerators are used today, and what we will expect the next generation of accelerators to do.

Nature News: The European Commission must make "immediate corrections" to the running of the European Research Council (ERC) or risk the body suffering a "deadly blow", an expert review has found.

On 23 July, a panel led by the former president of Latvia, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, published a review of the ERC—the first pan-European initiative to fund frontier research solely on the basis of excellence.

The ERC was established two years ago and is administered by an executive agency under the commission's control. The panel describes the council's management as a source of "great frustration and low-level conflict."

Nature News: A set of little lenses is stoking a big debate amongst physicists. At issue is whether the tiny spheres are capable of beating the so-called diffraction limit, beyond which no lens can, in theory, work.

Science News: Hundreds of high-resolution satellite photos of the Arctic sea ice taken during the past 10 years should be immediately declassified and released to the scientific research community, the National Research Council reported on July 15. Shortly after, the US Geological Survey made about a thousand of the images available to the public through the Global Fiducials Library.

“Most people from the scientific community are not aware that these images have been collected,” says Stephanie Pfirman, chair of the NRC committee that wrote the report. “They’ll be very excited to see these results.”

Science: India's first moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, has suffered a critical malfunction that jeopardizes the remainder of the mission. The spacecraft, which entered lunar orbit last November, can no longer orient itself with high precision. "Its pointing accuracy has been compromised," says a mission engineer who asked for anonymity.

Various: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission—the forerunner of the Department of Energy—in the early 1950s, is slowly being demolished thanks to $74 million of stimulus funding. Soon, by 2011, all traces of it will be gone reports Wired magazine.

LBNL has a flicker photo galley of the Bevatron, some of which are posted below.

The 10,000 ton Bevatron is a weak focusing synchrotron that was closely watched by Physics Today, both during construction and for the scientific results it produced.

Paul Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s and the Bevatron's mission—as the most powerful accelerator in the world—was to discover the antiproton (which it did) and explore the fundamental physics behind hadrons using beams of 6.2-GeV protons.

The Bevatron had a number of upgrades during its lifetime in an attempt to regain its status as one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and to continue to do interesting science.

In 1960 the Bevatron had a three-year upgrade which cost more than the initial construction ($9.6 million) and increased the intensity of the proton beam by a factor of four. In 1967, metal fatigue shut the Bevatron down for three months while repairs were made. In the early 1970s the accelerator switched to nitrogen ions, which were more energetic than the protons initially used in the accelerator, and made the Bevatron more attractive to the biological sciences.

By linking parts of the Bevatron with other equipment at LBNL— the SuperHILAC serving as the injector and the Bevatron as an accelerator—the Bevalac accelerator was created in 1974 which led to a completely new field of research: relativistic heavy-ion reactions. This time carbon-12 ions were injected into the ring (reaching 2.1 GeV), which regained LBNL's reputation of having the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator in the world.

Improvements to the Bevalac continued well into the 1980s. In 1982 new upgrades, which included a new vacuum system for the Bevatron, allowed the Bevalac to accelerate uranium ions.

In science, research at the Bevatron led to at least four Nobel Prizes, one for the discovery of the antiproton by Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain.

The Bevatron's beam was finally turned off in 1993 by one of the people who built it: Edward Lofgren.

Related Physics Today articles
Bevatron Launched (1954)
During the next three years (1961)
The Bevatron Reactivated (1963)
Bevatron Shut Down 3 Months: Metal Fatigue in Alternator (1967)
Long-lived kaon shows no 2-muon decay (1971)
Two accelerators switch to nitrogen ions (1971)
Conflicting evidence for K-meson decay (1972)
Bevalac makes a successful debut (1974)
Bevalac accelerates uranium (1982)
Probing Dense Nuclear Matter in the Laboratory (1993)

Wall Street Journal: Like many other technology companies, Hewlett-Packard is in the process of making layoffs and other cost cuts. In the quarter ended 30 April, HP’s selling, general and administrative expenses dropped 13% from the same period last year and its research-and-development budget fell by almost 20%.

But when it comes to advanced research—far-reaching projects that might not turn into profits for years—HP says it’s still investing. Next week, the company’s long-term research division, HP Labs, plans to announce an expanded program of grants to university researchers to pursue a variety of projects. HP won’t disclose the amount of money it’s spending on the grants, but says the budget has increased 30% since last year when the program started.

Various: Cosmologist Adrian Melott has been researching for some time mass extinctions in the Earth's fossil records and linking them to astrophysical events.

Recently, Melott and Brian Thomas looked at the Ordovician extinction, which occurred 450 million years ago and resulted in the loss of 60% of marine invertebrates.

According to computer simulations and matched with the fossil record, they find that their data suggests that photons from a gamma-ray burst approximately over the South Pole (and no further than -75 degrees) caused the atmosphere's chemistry to change, doubling the level of ultraviolet-B solar radiation reaching the surface.

In this scenario parts of north China, Laurentia, and New Guinea—which lay north of the equator—should be a refuge from the ultraviolet effects, and show a different pattern of extinction in the "first strike" of the end-Ordovician extinction, if it was induced by such a radiation event.

Melott cautions that gamma-rays or x-rays may not be the main cause for extinction events but could be the trigger for tipping an already stressed environment into a catastrophic event.

Related Link
Late Ordovician Geographic Patterns Of Extinction Compared With Simulations Of Astrophysical Ionizing Radiation Damage

In a broader article in SEED magazine Melott talks about his earlier research on cyclic mass extinctions.

There are at least 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record that fit a 62-million year cycle. Sometime ago Melott suggested that the solar-system's orbit around the Milky Way's center—which oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years, is the key—the galactic magnetic field protects the solar-system from extragalactic cosmic rays.

As the solar system "bobs" out of the galactic plane it becomes exposed to these cosmic rays which can cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash.

Related Links
The Extinction Oscillator
Do Extragalactic Cosmic Rays Induce Cycles in Fossil Diversity?

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Science: Descending into the limestone valley where China has chosen to build its paramount telescope is a treacherous hike. So steep and vast is the depression that the few dozen villagers who live at the bottom rarely leave.

Scale is precisely what China is going for with the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), a massive instrument that the government hopes will thrust China to the forefront of radio astronomy.

This month, engineers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing will drill into this remote corner of Guizhou Province for a final round of geo-engineering studies before breaking ground later this year.

When FAST sees first light in 2014, it will measure more than five football fields in diameter, making it the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world.

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FAST web site (in Chinese)

Los Angeles Times: Cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena explains her work on the Hubble constant, used to measure the universe's expansion, to LA Times reporter John Johnson Jr. She was named a recipient of the Gruber Prize.

CNET News: General Motors opened the doors to a battery research and development plant in Michigan on Monday, a facility the company says will accelerate its move to electric vehicles.

The Global Battery Systems Lab in Warren, Mich., will be used to test the lithium ion batteries planned for the Chevy Volt as well as other energy storage systems such as ultracapacitors, GM said.

The facility, at 33,000 square feet, is four times larger than GM's existing testing operation and will be used by 1,000 engineers, according to the company which hosted a ceremony with Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm and GM CEO Fritz Henderson.

NPR: NASA scientists Paul Goldsmith and Charles Lawrence discuss the space telescopes Herschel and Planck, which the European Space Agency launched last month. Herschel will investigate star and galaxy formation, and Planck will observe the residual glow of the newborn universe.

Science: Every June for 25 years, meteorologist William Gray and associates at Colorado State University (CSU), Fort Collins, have tried to decipher what the coming summer and fall have in store for hurricane country.

Now for the first time, the CSU group has graded itself. The researchers' statistical analysis credits their forecasts with a "modest" improvement over the baseline assumption that every season would be normal.

Others concede that the group has shown some measurable skill in forecasting—just not much.

The performance of the CSU forecasts has been "not too good" to "pretty bad," says seasonal forecaster Anthony Barnston of Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society in Palisades, New York. But then, he and colleagues have done their own seasonal hurricane forecasts, and "our skills are lousy also. No one is very good at this."

Nature News: ITER—a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source—will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped.

Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first.

The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen.

But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.

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The Register: Hewlett Packard has confirmed that yesterday's announcement of UK job cuts will not just hit its manufacturing plant in Scotland, but also HP's research laboratories in Bristol.

The firm will not detail exactly what is happening, but emails from HP staff sent to the Register suggest as many as half its Bristol research staff could be laid off.

"According to various sources and friends, HP has at a single stroke on Thursday HALVED their R&D people based in Bristol, UK on Thursday. 3 entire labs are to be axed. Approx 70 or so positions are to be eliminated - with completion towards the end of this year," says one email.

HP announced 5700 job cuts in Europe earlier this week.

HP said: "HP Labs is streamlining its research portfolio to further sharpen its focus on creating a pipeline of high-impact innovation with a clear path to market that addresses the most important customer challenges. HP is committed to bringing breakthrough innovation to market quickly, and HP Labs will continue to play a significant role in this effort."

Science: In 1962, astronomers discovered a shining dot in the sky that appeared to be moving at an astonishing 47,000 kilometers per second, or one-sixth the speed of light. The velocity indicated that the object—named 3C 273—was a few billion light-years away, yet it was so bright it could have been a nearby star.

To study the object further, researchers delved into a trove of the astronomical past: a collection of photographic plates at Harvard University dating as far back as the 1860s. They spotted 3C 273 on some 600 photographs taken with a variety of telescopes over 70 years, some of them days apart.

The images showed fluctuations in the object's brightness on time scales as short as a week. Because the object could not be dimming or brightening faster than light could traverse it, the researchers inferred that in spite of being more luminous than a billion suns, the object had to be less than a light-week across—the size of the solar system. The finding helped characterize 3C 273 as a new type of object known as a quasar, one of the most powerful energy sources in the universe.

The discovery shows the value of historical sky observations, says Harvard astronomer Jonathan Grindlay, who is leading an initiative to scan the 500,000 plates in the university's collection and put them online. The project—called Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard (DASCH)—is part of a movement by a small but persistent group of astronomers to preserve, digitize, and study old astronomical photographs in hope of doing new science.

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In last week's Science Kukushkin and colleagues describe a variant of this technique for measuring the energy and momentum dependence of the excitations of a two-dimensional (2D) electron system.

In this technique, momentum is imparted with sound and, separately, energy is imparted with light. This approach allows the spectrum of "magnetorotons"—characteristic excitations of the states associated with the fractional quantum Hall effect—to be measured directly.
The observed spectral features were predicted many years ago but have eluded direct measurement until now.

Related Link
Dispersion of the Excitations of Fractional Quantum Hall States

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: For the last four years, a research team from Texas Tech University has studied the degree of radioactive contamination at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center in Iraq.

Al Tuwaitha was the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. The site is in many ways historically unique: It has been used in the development of nuclear weapons; it has been bombed in repeated military campaigns; and it has been looted by civilians who in 2003 inadvertently dispersed radioactive material at and around the research site and in their own homes and villages.

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Slate: Five months ago, Sheri Sangji, a young technician in a biochemistry laboratory at the University of California-Los Angeles began to transfer a tablespoon of t-butyl lithium from one container to another. T-butyl lithium is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites on contact with air, but Sheri Sangji wasn't wearing a protective lab coat--instead, she had on a flammable synthetic sweatshirt. Somehow the stuff spilled onto her clothing, and she was engulfed in flames. Sangji died from her burns 18 days later.

According to a recently completed government investigation, the fire could have been foreseen. UCLA's own safety officials had already faulted the lab on the latter issue back in October, but the problem went uncorrected.

James Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute in Natick, Mass., estimates that accidents and injuries occur hundreds of times more frequently in academic labs than in industrial ones.

The presence of flagrant safety violations at a major research university is no surprise, says Slate's Beryl Lieff Benderly.

Since what counts in academia is publishing papers and winning grants, any change will have to start with the people who control the research money, says Benderly. Federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation should treat the welfare of the students, postdocs, and technicians who do the labor of American science with the same attention they afford experimental subjects and laboratory animals.

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After Serious Accident, SLAC Experiments Remain Shut Down and DOE Report Faults Lab's Safety Oversight (February 2005)

Josh Wurman is president of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colorado, and a VORTEX2 member. He is now looking for storms in Nebraska, and joins host Neal Conan to talk about 15 years studying tornadoes.

Six weeks later, with 70% of its staff homeless, the 23,000-student university is starting to work again--in tents or in buildings loaned by other towns. The underground particle-physics laboratory at Gran Sasso, which remained undamaged 15 kilometers from L'Aquila, resumed work on 4 May, even though 90% of its staff are homeless.

The L'Aquila physics faculty found a relatively easy solution by moving into the above-ground facilities of the Gran Sasso laboratories, where many homeless staff also sleep. "Of course there will be crowding -- and it will be for some years," says Gran Sasso director Eugenio Coccia. "But we are glad to be able to have such a role.

It has not been easy to find the mental energy to think about science in the circumstances, admits Gran Sasso physicist Francesco Arneodo. "With so many homeless it is hard to focus your full attention on research," he says, the strain clear on his face. "But now it is OK—we are back!"

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Spacewalkers Michael Massimino and Michael Good left the space shuttle at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1345 GMT) to resuscitate the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which failed after a power failure in 2004.

Such moments are happening more and more often these days, as researchers seek out innovative ways to exploit mobile phones. The opportunities are tantalizing. Phones are increasingly being equipped with not only accelerometers, but also cameras, Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and Internet connectivity. Many of them can support programs devised by anyone, not just the phone's manufacturer, which means that digitally savvy scientists can write and distribute mobile-phone software for everything from monitoring traffic to reporting invasive species.

The rover, one of two NASA vehicles operating on Mars, has a broken right wheel. It has dust on its solar panels. It's operating at about 30 percent of normal power. Various sensors and software programs have gone screwy.

Then, on April 9, Spirit refused to wake up. The rover is designed to sleep at night, when there is no sunlight hitting the solar panels. But Spirit snoozed right through its wake-up call. It happened three times in succession. Finally a backup timer got Spirit up and moving again after a 27-hour slumber.

One key stumbling block for an ICF energy reactor is laser technology. NIF managers hope to perform about two shots a day because of the time needed to let optical elements cool down, check for damage, replace any damaged parts, and install a new fuel capsule. At that rate, with each shot producing fusion burns of 20 megajoules--its initial target--NIF will barely generate enough power to keep a single light bulb glowing. According to Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Science Centre, Britain's fusion research lab near Oxford, "laser fusion has all the problems of magnetic fusion, but ICF also has to find a laser that can fire many times per second and is 20% to 30% efficient, plus how to make fuel pellets at low cost."

BBC: The US has finished constructing a huge physics experiment aimed at recreating conditions at the heart of our Sun.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

Related Links
Further information

It is a dire scene being echoed at campuses across the United States as public universities struggle through the annual legislative budget processes in the worsening economic downturn. Private universities are facing their own challenges, including plummeting endowments1 and shrinking philanthropic gifts. The problem for public universities (see graphic), though, is especially acute in the sunbelt states such as Arizona, where the burst of the housing bubble has hit tax revenues hard and slashed the budgets of universities that, until recently, had ambitious expansion plans.

The Register: New battery technology developed at MIT has made a big media splash today, supposedly offering lithium-ion energy storage which could charge up fully "in seconds." However, no such capability has been demonstrated: in fact the kit doesn't seem very important.

The research, currently available on arXiv, has been submitted to Nature for peer-review, but not everyone is convinced the group has found a supernova chemical fingerprint in the ice.

“The basic idea is an interesting one, but it’s way premature to accept these findings” at face value, comments Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England. “If the authors could show convincingly that they had supernovas, this would be exciting...But I think we are a long way from that.”

In keeping with a pledge President Obama made during the campaign, the budget released last week cuts off almost all funding for creating a permanent burial site for a large portion of the nation's radioactive nuclear waste at the site in the Nevada desert. Congress selected the location in 1987 and reaffirmed the choice in 2002. About $7.7 billion has been sunk into the project since its inception.

The water level at Homestake is down 254 feet since the high-water mark was reached last August.

Homestake is 8,000 feet deep. Mining stopped in 2001, and the underground pumps were turned off just before Homestake was sealed shut in 2003. Water was slowly filling the mine until last year. Now, the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is pumping water out to reopen Homestake as an underground laboratory, with experiments as deep as 4,850 feet underground

For that investment, the region has attracted $23.4 million in outside research grants and applied for $35.8 million more. The investment has also generated about 100 jobs and created partnerships with dozens of private fuel cell companies or industries working with the technology.

And later this month, the National Hydrogen Association will bring more than 1,000 researchers, manufacurers and government officials to Columbia for its annual conference and expo.

Boosters say that’s not bad for being in only the fourth year of a 20-year plan to turn the Columbia area into a national center of hydrogen research, part of a statewide push to make hydrogen pay.

But critics, including S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, say that too much money has been spent on a technology that might not be the wave of the future.

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How to avoid contaminating planetary neighbors NPR

In a study published today in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, earth systems scientist Tim Lenton of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and a graduate student analyzed 17 schemes for cooling the planet.

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units -- the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target -- was installed on 26 January.

Nature: Researchers have teleported a single ion of the element ytterbium over a metre in distance, shattering previous records. Photons have gone further but teleportation of matter has only occurred between ions in the same trap over a few micrometers.

The Mercury News: Stanford University has received $100 million to create a new energy institute where scholars can study everything from solar cells to energy markets and economics.

"I see a whale, I see a six-to-12-volt electric generator that is able to pump 1,000 liters per pulse through more than 108 miles of veins and arteries," he said. The intricate wiring of the whale's heart is being studied as a model for a device called a nanoscale atrioventricular bridge, which will undergo animal testing next year and could replace pacemakers for the millions of people whose diseased hearts need help to beat steadily.

But all is not well for ITER. "To keep momentum, ITER needs the collective efforts and continued support from its members, laying the foundations for a new model of global scientific collaboration," said Kaname Ikeda, director-general of the ITER Organization, in a statement at the meeting.

The bad news comes from the United States which, "cannot live up to our commitments" to ITER, the Energy Department's Gene Nardella told an advisory committee earlier this month. Congress allocated only $20.5 million for the project, just enough for staffing, instead of a requested $214 million for 2009. A National Research Council panel in June warned, "The lack of funding stability will make it difficult for the U.S. to effectively participate in ITER, and ultimately, to access and thus benefit from the valuable scientific and technical knowledge to be gained from the facility."

The New York Times: In a tour de force of office-supply physics, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that it is possible to produce x rays by simply unrolling Scotch tape.

This news story will be updated throughout the day.

At a press conference this morning 87-year-old Nambu said he was awakened by a telephone call from the academy. "I was surprised and honored. I didn't expect it. I've been told for many years that I was on the list (to get the award)," he said. "I had almost given up."

Nambu moved to the United States from Japan in 1952 and has worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.

In Japan, 64-year-old Kobayashi at his own press conference said "It's an honor to receive the prize for my work from long time ago."

In a separate news conference at his university, 68-year-old Maskawa said, "As a scientist, I'm not thrilled by the prize."

"I was happier when our findings were acknowledged [by the community] around 2002. The Nobel prize is a rather mundane thing."

In a review of Jeremy Bernstein's "The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics" (August 1989, page 65) Robert March recommends the book for giving Makoto "Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa the recognition they deserve, but rarely get, for anticipating the discovery of the third generation in their model of CP violation". After today that recognition will be widely known.

Passion for symmetry

The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level.

As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.

The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.

A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.

Related Physics Today Articles
The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter February 2003, page 30
Novel B Factories Close in on the Violation of CP Symmetry May 2001, page 17
At Last We Have an Undisputed Observation of `Direct' CP Violation in Kaon Decay May 1999, page 17
Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time-Reversal Symmetry February 1999, page 72
Broken Symmetry: Selected Papers of Y. Nambu (Review) October 1996, page 72
The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics (Review) August 1989, page 65
Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s November 1988, page 56
Flavor SU(3) Symmetries in Particle Physics April 1988, page 29
CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation October 1988, page 17
Neutral B Mesons Show Surprisingly Large Flavor Mixing August 1987, page 17

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Science: European physicists who study particles from outer space made a pitch this week for the ambitious and costly experiments they want to build over the next decade. "We've worked hard to get the tools; now we need to move to large-scale detectors," says Christian Spiering of DESY, Germany's particle physics lab in Hamburg.

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The Arlington, Va.-based NSF's interest in CubeSats stems from a recommendation in the June 2006 "Report of the Assessment Committee for the National Space Weather Program — an interagency initiative to speed improvement of space weather services."

One of the report's recommendations emphasized that agencies involved in space weather work should look into the feasibility of using micro-satellites with miniaturized sensors to provide cost-effective science and operational data sources for space weather applications such as: improving understanding of space weather, helping predict conditions in the space environment and measuring the physical processes that affect the state of the sun and solar wind, as well as impacts they have upon Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and upper atmosphere.

Science: The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers showing that electromagnetic fields (EMFs) from cell phones can cause DNA breakage are at the center of a misconduct controversy at the Medical University of Vienna (MUV). Critics had argued that the data looked too good to be real, and in May a university investigation agreed, concluding that data in both studies had been fabricated and that the papers should be retracted.

To young people primed for openness by the confessional existence they live online, that may not seem like a big deal.

But in the world of science - where promotions, tenure, and fortune rest on publishing papers in prestigious journals, securing competitive grants, and patenting discoveries - it's a brazen, potentially self-destructive move.

Science: The self-assembly of block copolymers into nanoscale features is potentially attractive as a means for patterning media in microelectronic applications. This new route to nanopatterning is gaining interest as optical lithography, the current engine of the semiconductor industry, begins to approach intrinsic technological limits while demand for higher-density features for improved data storage and computing speed continues to grow. These applications require not only regularly sized nanoscale features but also a degree of perfection of order and registry relative to other components, which have so far been elusive in self-assembled systems. In this week's issue of Science, two papers ( Graphoepitaxy of Self-Assembled Block Copolymers on Two-Dimensional Periodic Patterned Templates and Density Multiplication and Improved Lithography by Directed Block Copolymer Assembly) describe how block copolymers in conjunction with coarse templates are used to create nanoscale structures with an unprecedented level of control.

BBC: Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible.

Various: The FBI has released details about its case against accused researcher Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he would be prosecuted as the prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. A number of websites have provided some analysis of the FBI's case. The Smoking Gun has collated the highlights to the prosecution's case. Meryl Nass, a noted anthrax researcher, writes on her blog Anthrax Vaccine that “What came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes.”

Nass raises the following main questions:

1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine’s efficacy is weak — and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.

2. Earlier in the week, anonymous officials at the FBI leaked to the press that the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.

3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.

Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper Nass wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which Nass thanked him for his contributions.

4. Ivins was the “sole custodian” of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and more than 100 people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be “custodians” of it too.

Nass also points out that the FBI report does not explain how the anthrax was weaponized, nor can explain how Ivins created it. The FBI also cannot explain how the letters were mailed from Princeton. "Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't.... If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone," says Nass.

Update: 8/19/2008. The FBI release some of the evidence related to their investigation. NPR's David Kestenbaum provides some details of the case, along with New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Wade. Although some of the techniques have been reviewed, the research has yet to be independently verified by experts not associated to the case. Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations’ biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told the New York Times that he remained skeptical of the bureau’s argument despite the new evidence. “It’s a pretty tenuous argument,” Spertzel said, adding that he questioned the bureau’s claim that the powder was less than military grade. Nass adds some more questions to the coverage

Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.

The Hindu: A team of scientists led by researchers from Princeton University has discovered a new way that electrons behave in materials. The discovery could lead to new kinds of electronic device, says eurekalert press release.

Nature News: Many of the research projects launched as part of the International Polar Year (IPY), which runs from March 2007 to March 2009, are under threat because of the steep rise in marine-fuel costs. Hundreds of Arctic and Antarctic scientists face uncertainty as polar science programmes worldwide are curtailed, postponed or cancelled.

Science: The international acoustics meeting recently held in Paris, France has had a number of stories picked up by science magazine that appeared in last week's issue. Speech can betray fatigue according to a new software program that analyzes the phonetic features of each person's speech.

Tigers and polar bears have had their hearing tested: The bears had a hearing range similar to that of humans, between 125 and 20,000 hertz; Tiger have hearing sensitive to infrasound, sound of lower frequency than most mammals perceive.

Acoustic instruments in the Indian ocean designed to detect nuclear explosions are now being put to use detecting ice cracking in Antarctic thousands of miles away. Getting a statistical handle on the numerous small ice cracks that are not visible from space will help determine whether the rate of ice-shelf degradation stays within natural bounds or steadily increases due to mechanisms such as climate change.

New ultrasound-based technologies are poised to probe the inner structure of bones and treat otherwise incurable cancers but the hype surrounding these techniques may be minimizing some of the risks associated with the techniques.

FInally, the newest generation of archaeologists may be wielding sensitive microphones and recorders to map hidden and abandoned structures according to several sessions in Paris devoted to archaeological acoustics.

Various: The final report into the allegations of scientific miscount concerning Purdue University nuclear engineering professor Rusi Taleyarkhan has been released. Taleyarkhan had published papers in which he reported seeing evidence of nuclear fusion in the collapse of tiny bubbles in a liquid subjected to ultrasonic excitation in a process called sonoluminance. This has not been replicated by other researchers. The allegations, which were issued in 2006, and conclusions are summarized in the local newspaper, the Journal and Courier.

Of the nine specific allegations, two were found to comprise scientific misconduct. The committee "could not find any other instances of scientists being able to replicate Taleyarkhan's results without Taleyarkhan having direct involvement with the experiments," but notes that this comes "just short of questioning whether Taleyarkhan's results were fraudulent."

Related Links
Details of what Purdue's investigation found Journal and Courier
The Full Purdue Report (pdf)
Purdue press release

Fort Worth Business Press: Bumsoo Han recently received a four-year, $1.26 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the long-term storage of engineered human tissue, and his work at UT-Arlington will include work with skin-like cells and breast cancer cells. Work with the fibroblasts, a type of cell that provides a structural framework for many tissues, will include preserving them better with freezing, and the work with breast cancer will look at how to kill the cells with cold.

Science: A group of distinguished former government officials (Mark Schaefer, D. James Baker, John H. Gibbons, Charles G. Groat, Donald Kennedy, Charles F. Kennel, David Rejeski) argue in Science magazine that organizational changes must be made at the federal level to align the public institutional infrastructure to address the unprecedented environmental and economic challenges in the decades ahead such as climate change.

The most pressing organizational change that is required they say, is the establishment of an independent Earth Systems Science Agency formed by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Science: To make a new collider, physicists in Japan plan to push an existing machine to its limits. Others in Italy hope to cobble one together from old parts and a bright idea

NatureNews: Universities in the United Kingdom may be doing far more research for the military than official estimates acknowledge, according to a report released last week.

Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), a Folkestone-based group that campaigns against military spending, says that of 13 universities surveyed, 12 received an average of around £2.4 million (US$4.7 million) each to conduct military and security-related research between 2005 and 2006. Some received as much as £5 million. The figures contrast sharply with SGR's estimate of an average of £400,000 per UK university based on the official 2004 figure of a total of £44 million defence-related research grants across all UK universities. “Our analysis leads us to ask whether government statistics in this area are as reliable as they should be,” the study says.

New Scientist: A radio telescope that spans four continents has been set up for the first time.

In an observational run conducted in May, antennas in North America, South America, Europe and Africa all pointed in the same direction. Signals were fed by fibre optics to create real-time images at a hub in the Netherlands..

Recently, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico joined a project called Electronic Very Long Baseline Interferometry (e-VLBI), which can make temporary radio telescopes that rival the size of the Earth.

Its size allows the array to image objects – like the bright 'afterglow' formed when a high-speed jet of matter from a gamma-ray burst slams into its surroundings – that just look like points to individual radio telescopes, says Chris Salter of Arecibo.

University of Delaware: Faculty in the space physics group in the Bartol Research Institute and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UD have been awarded several multi-year grants by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct theoretical and observational research projects.

Baltimore Sun: Governor unveils plan to invest $1.1 billion for research center, medical studies

Nature: Periodic oscillations have been observed in what should be straightforward exponential decay curves of two radioactive isotopes. An entirely mysterious phenomenon, its proposed cause seems equally exotic.

BBC: A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Physics Today: The Department of Energy announced today that the Princeton University-based National Compact Stellarator Experiment has been canceled. The news was delivered in person by Raymond Fonck, DOE associate director for fusion energy sciences.

"In late 2006, it became clear that the NCSX construction project would not be able to meet its approved baseline total project cost of $102M or its completion date of July 2009," said Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in a statement. Since then the DOE, Princeton University, and thePrinceton Plasma Physics Laboratory have been reviewing options for the project and PPPL. They concluded that "the budget increases, schedule delays and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure," said Orbach. The new proposed cost for NCSX was $170 million and its new start date was August 2013, which would have put research at PPPL in peril, said an April 2008 Office of Science report.

"PPPL's future as a world-leading center of fusion energy and plasma sciences is more assured by a renewed focus on the successful Spherical Torus confinement concept," added Orbach. Under the existing construction proposal for NCSX, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) would have had to close, which would have had implications for US involvement in the ITER fusion project.

"The Spherical Torus is closely related to the [ITER] tokamak, and experiments planned for the next several years in the NSTX facility promise many exciting discoveries that should directly impact our ability to understand the new plasma regimes expected in ITER," says Orbach. "Proposed upgrades for [NSTX] can keep this facility at the forefront of fusion science research... well into the future."

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. 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 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, Ge, 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."

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".

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.

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)

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?"

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

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

Science Online: Physicists explore subatomic particle strategy for revealing archaeological secrets

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: 103-year-old chemical reaction pops up again

salon.com: The most groundbreaking science is being done outside academia and government. And the egomaniacal geneticist is leading the way.

Nature: The atoms and bonds that make up complex solids can be identified chemically — a feat made possible by cleverly combining spectroscopic and structural information conveyed by electrons scattered through a thin sample.

Nature: Theory shows how quantum weirdness could still be seen on a large scale.

BBC : Scientists at the University of Oxford are trying to harness the energy released when bubbles collapse as a way of killing off cancer cells

Nature: Physicists get down to the theoretical limit of precision.

National Geographic: Two teams of researchers have proposed competing explanations for one of the most brilliant—and puzzling—supernovas in the observable universe, 2006gy.

Science: Experiments show that electron spins can flow without dissipation in a novel electrical insulator.

Wired: Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years.

MSNBC: Researchers aren't certain if radiation-blocking layer is on the mend

Nature: Well-established models of nuclei describe properties such as shells and magic numbers. But how do these predictions stand up to scrutiny for exotic, unstable nuclei? Pretty well, according to the latest study.

San Diego Union-Tribune: In a darkened laboratory on the UCSD campus, Mark Thiemens peers intently into the blue flame of a blowtorch, directing its fierce, fusing heat at the glowing orange ends of two glass tubes, each a piece of a larger latticework of interconnected beakers, flasks and bulbs.

Nature: Princeton stellarator threatened with closure.

Science: In some complex materials, the electrons appear to be unexpectedly heavy. Helium atoms show similar behavior in much simpler thin films of helium-3.

Xinhua: Chinese lawmakers are legislating for the first time to allow scientists to report failures during the process of innovation without blotting their records in future funding applications.

VNUNet.com: Scientists have published a new theory which describes how the transistors in next-generation quantum computers may be created.

ScienceNow: A huge tank of liquid buried deep in the Italian Apennine mountains has made the first accurate measurement of low-energy neutrinos coming from the heart of the sun. The results generally confirm physicists' theories of how the sun's nuclear furnace generates its heat and support recent findings about the strange nature of neutrinos.

Space.com: A giant underground experiment has given researchers their first glimpse into the heart of the sun and the subatomic particles that shine down on Earth everyday.

NPR: In southern France, researchers from around the globe are building a massive machine that will recreate fusion. That's where two atoms become one, and release energy. Researchers say this new machine will come close to their final goal: a fusion power plant that gener