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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Guinnessy

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

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

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

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

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

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

and the other half jointly to

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

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

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

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

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

Kao

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

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

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

Boyle and Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oral History Transcript—Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tsunami earthquake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nature News: An independent report has all but ruled out radioactive contamination from the experiments of physicist Ernest Rutherford as the source of a cluster of deaths at the University of Manchester, UK.

Related Link
Manchester University deaths not linked to Rutherford radiation The Guardian

Science: At the height of the Korean War, a scared 16-year-old boy made a promise as he lay wounded by shrapnel on a battlefield. "I said, ‘God, if you save my life, I will return this love to my enemy,’" recalls Kim Chin-Kyung, who was fighting for the south against the north.

Six decades later, the 74-year-old businessman turned university administrator is keeping his word. Last week, Kim was appointed president of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) at a ceremony in Pyongyang to commemorate completion of the $35 million campus, which after 4 years of delays is expected to open in November to the crème de la crème of North Korea's science graduate students.

Earth Island Journal: A recent New York Times article pointedly asked whether NASA climate scientist James Hansen still matters. The subtext to the story was, has Hansen been too vocal and too unconventional in his criticism of Washington’s response to climate change to be taken seriously?

Nell Greenberg interviews Hansen over his recent political action on combating climate change, and how he ended up in climate science in the first place.

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.

csmonitor.com: Some 60,000 metric tons of radioactive waste is stored at nuclear power plants across the US, awaiting federal action that’s already a decade late.

Nature News: India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh will visit the site of a proposed underground neutrino laboratory next month, to try to break the impasse between physicists and environmentalists over its construction.

The US$160 million India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) was to have been completed by 2012 to study the elusive particles known as neutrinos. But its construction is mired in controversy over the wisdom of locating the facility in prime elephant and tiger habitat at Singara in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve, 250 kilometers south of Bangalore.

Physics Today: Peter Chen, the well-known and eminent head of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich) has resigned after an investigation—at his request—concluded that falsified data had been published in a doctoral thesis of one of his research students and in two papers that his research group had submitted and published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The investigation could not conclude who was responsible for the falsifications.

In a statement released by ETH Zürich the institute said "out of respect for ETH Zürich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as vice president at the end of September 2009."

"Scientific misconduct jeopardizes the very core of research and must carry consequences," says ETH Zürich President Ralph Eichler. "This has been the case here and the matter also shows that the established control mechanisms for research really do work."

The research projects affected hail from the field of basic research in chemistry at ETH Zürich and were published in 2000 by members of the team then headed by Chen. He has been professor of physical-organic chemistry since 1994 and the vicepresident of research and corporate relations since 2007.

The papers under suspicion concerned results relating to the spectroscopic structural clarification of hydrocarbon radicals: short-lived chemical compounds that are formed during combustion processes. The number of citations accrued by the two papers is 66, which is quite a large score.

Intensive search for discrepancies

The experiments were conducted with the so-called "zero-kinetic-energy photoelectron spectroscopy" (ZEKE) method, a high-resolution version of photoelectron spectroscopy. The method can be used, among other things, to analyze highly reactive or unstable compounds. The measurements include those of the energies of electrons that break away from the molecule under examination after it has absorbed light. The spectra determined as a result can then be used to analyze the geometric structure and dynamics of the compounds.

However, after the papers were published, other research groups working in the same field obtained significantly different results.

Chen's group set about seeking an explanation for the discrepancies in conjunction with a former postdoctoral researcher's group. The discrepancies initially involved the ionization energies of hydrocarbon radicals, that is, the energy required to remove the most weakly bound electron from the rest of the radical.

A disturbing conclusion

Not only was the attempt to reproduce the values measured unsuccessful, but other inconsistencies led Chen to suspect foul play. He called upon ETH Zürich's executive board to appoint a scientific board of inquiry to clarify the irregularities at the beginning of January 2009. At the same time, he and his co-authors withdrew the first publication.

Five internationally renowned professors (three external ones and two from ETH Zürich) were appointed to the commission. They scrutinized the studies in question, repeated the processes used at the time where possible and interviewed the three authors involved in the experiments: the doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher at the time and Chen.

The commission concluded that some of the data had been falsified. For example, certain diagrams involving representations of the measured spectra often contained identical patterns from static, that is technically unavoidable signals without any discernible information content. The fact that some of the noise patterns recur in an identical fashion is virtually impossible, which suggests they were added to the diagrams afterward says the final report. Moreover, repeating the experiments revealed that some of the lines apparently measured within the spectra did not actually exist.

In addition, the relevant lab books and most of the raw data for the experiments are missing, limiting the likelihood that the experiment could be successfully replicated.

Resolution

All of the people involved in the experiments categorically deny having carried out the falsifications; however, they all agree that the data were falsified.

Consequently, the second publication with the fake data was withdrawn.

At this point, the author of the doctoral thesis initially withdrew his thesis on his own accord, but retracted the withdrawal later.

ETH Zürich has postponed the planned publication of the commission's report for the time being for legal reasons associated with the doctoral thesis.

After receiving the report ETH Zürich's executive board conducted its own investigation to form its own opinion. "The commission resolved the matter objectively and I am much obliged to them in the name of ETH Zürich," says Eichler. "Unfortunately, there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications," he added.

Chen assumes responsibility

As the current vicepresident responsible for quality assurance in research, Chen felt that the incident had compromised his effectiveness, and decided to step down.

"Peter Chen is an impressive researcher and a highly valued member of our board in every respect," stresses Eichler. "We very much regret to lose such an accomplished leader, but we are happy that he'll remain in our midst as a model colleague, outstanding scientist and professor."

Paul Guinnessy

Related Links
The zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectrum of the propargyl radical, C₃H₃ Published February 2000
Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅ Published July 2000
Erratum: "Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅" [J. Chem. Phys. 113, 561 (2000)] Published July 2009

Related News stories
Senior professor resigns over falsified 'pure research' The Daily Telegraph
Research chief steps down over fake data NatureNews
Embarrassment as technology institute research chief resigns World Radio Switzerland

Wired.com: A Texas team called Armadillo Aerospace is the first to qualify for the top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge after flying its moonship twice in two hours to simulate a moon landing. Armadillo Aerospace is one of three teams in the hunt for the $1 million award.

The Texans saw their craft, Scorpius, easily meet the requirements for Level 2 of the challenge, which require ascending to at least 50 meters, flying horizontally, and landing on a rocky replica of the lunar surface 50 meters away then making a return flight.

Each flight, made last weekend in Caddo Mills, Texas, had to last 180 seconds. John Carmack, the legendary coder behind Doom and Quake who leads Armadillo Aerospace, said Scorpius is capable of much greater altitude.

"Our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space," he said, adding that Armadillo plans flights to 6,000 feet soon at its base in Texas before heading to New Mexico to achieve greater heights. Fully loaded with ethanol and liquid oxygen fuel, the craft weighs about 1,900 pounds.

Related Link
Engine leak stalls Xombie rocket's bid for NASA cash

The Walrus: Installed on the second floor of a small building on the summit of Arizona's Mount Graham, Guy Consolmagno is multitasking. He's checking e-mail on his laptop and listening to the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on his iPod, all the while keeping an eye on a bank of computer monitors.

One floor up, nestled in a silvery-white dome, a telescope is trained on a potato-shaped chunk of rock and ice known as Haumea, which orbits the Sun some six billion kilometers from Earth. Thin clouds have been drifting overhead since sundown, but if they dissipate, the telescope's digital camera will record changes in Haumea's brightness as it tumbles through the outer reaches of the solar system, offering Consolmagno and fellow astronomers hints about the structure and evolution of our planetary family.

All this is typical fare for a scientist. What is perhaps surprising is that Consolmagno is also a Jesuit brother, that many of his colleagues are ordained priests, and that they're scanning the heavens with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope or, more affectionately, the "Pope scope." The state-of-the-art facility is part of the Vatican Observatory, established behind St. Peter's Basilica in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII at least partly to show that the Roman Catholic Church was not anti-science—an allegation that has persisted since Galileo was dragged before the Inquisition for claiming that the Earth moves.

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.

Nature News: In 2003, the University of Rochester in New York launched a digital archive designed to preserve and share dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores—just about any kind of digital data the university's investigators could produce.

At the time of the launch, the university librarians were worried that a flood of uploaded data might swamp the available storage space.

Six years later, the US$200,000 repository lies mostly empty.

Researchers had been very supportive of the archive idea, recalls Susan Gibbons, vice-provost and dean of the university's River Campus Libraries—especially as the alternative was to keep on scattering their data and dissertations across an ever-proliferating array of unintegrated computers and websites.

"So we spent all this money, we spent all this time, we got the software up and running, and then we said, 'OK, here it is. We're ready. Give us your stuff'," she says. "And that's where we hit the wall." When the time came, scientists couldn't find their data, or didn't understand how to use the archive, or lamented that they just didn't have any more hours left in the day to spend on this business.

A similar reality check has greeted other data-sharing efforts.

Most researchers happily embrace the idea of sharing. It opens up observations to independent scrutiny, fosters new collaborations and encourages further discoveries in old data sets.

But in practice those advantages often fail to outweigh researchers' concerns. What will keep work from being scooped, poached or misused? What rights will the scientists have to relinquish? Where will they get the hours and money to find and format everything?

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 News: Shortly before his 80th birthday, on September 15, the physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann spoke with Science News Editor in Chief Tom Siegfried about his views on the current situation in particle physics and the interests he continues to pursue in other realms of science.

Gell-Mann is most well known for introducing the concept of quarks, the building blocks of protons, neutrons and other particles that interact under the influence of the strong nuclear force. (see The Status Quark).

After many years as a professor of physics at Caltech, Gell-Mann moved in the mid-1980s to New Mexico as one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute, where he continues his research today.

Science: The Moon isn't made of green cheese and almost certainly doesn't harbor hypothetical particles called "strangelets," an analysis of lunar soil has shown. The result undermines a possible strangelet sighting a decade ago and strengthens the case that the bizarre particles, which protesters once feared might emerge from an atom smasher and consume Earth, don't exist.

"I'm not surprised," says Frank Wilczek, a theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "It would be a great discovery to find strangelets, but the theoretical case for them is pretty shaky." Still, he says, "it's not crazy" to look for them.

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.

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

The Daily Telegraph: Tom Boles, 65, has seen 125 exploding stars, more than anyone else. The previous record—set by Bulgarian-born professor Fritz Zwicky, who identified 123 exploding stars before his death in 1974—stood for 36 years.

His latest discoveries were made on August 20 when he spotted supernova number 124, or "2009i"', followed by number 125 or "2009io" a few nights later, helping him to the record.

The painstaking task, which took him 13 years, has earned him the respect of the professional science community.

John Mason, from the British Astronomical Association, said Boles's achievement was unparalleled in the history of the organization.

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.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

The Register: In a project described as "the computing equivalent of the raising of the Mary Rose," engineers at Bletchley Park intend to restore a 1950s-era computer—featuring a magnificent 112.5 bytes of memory—to working order.

The machine in question was built at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell in Oxfordshire. It was designed in 1949 to automate the job of a human calculating team, whose work was apparently so boring that mistakes became unacceptably frequent.

NYTimes.com: IBM researcher Frances Ross is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics.

Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster, and more powerful than today's transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

NPR: Van Gogh, N.C. Wyeth, and other artists recycled canvases by painting over previous works. Today museum scientists are using new x-ray technology to uncover the outline of hidden paintings, and using chemistry to fill in the colors. Jennifer Mass, senior scientist at the scientific research and analysis laboratory at the Winterthur Museum, explains the techniques.

Mt. Wilson Observatory: Updated: 9/3/2009: The observatory has escaped serious damage although 40 ongoing research projects will have to be rescheduled, and all the delicate equipment will have to be checked for soot and dust damage. Some scientists had been waiting more than a year for observing time reports the LA Times.

Updated: 9/2/2009 Mount Wilson "is still in good shape" said Incident Commander Dietrich at a briefing this morning. The Californian fire brigades are reporting that the observatory should be safe for the time being.

Previous Report 9/1/2009

US Forest Servie Fire Dispatch has informed Hal McAlister, director of the Mt Wilson Observatory that as of 9:40 PDT this morning, ground crews were back at the Observatory. As of 8:00 am, air tankers were back in operation.

The dispatcher expressed his opinion that as long as the fire continues to press the mountain from one direction "you are going to make it."

Furthermore, there is some light rain developing in places in the Los Angeles basin, and there is a possibility for some thunderstorm activity that could lead to dry lightning. The humidity is up and the temperature is a bit lower, so, all in all, things are looking more promising than they have in the last few days.

View from the observatory as of noon (PDT), Tuesday 1 September.

The latest news can be found here.

Meanwhile, the LA Times takes a look back at the history of the Mt. Wilson observatory. Astronomer Edwin Hubble for example, used the then-groundbreaking 100-inch Hooker telescope, to make two of the most surprising scientific discoveries of the 20th century: The universe was far larger than anyone imagined and that it was expanding.

Related News Article
Historic Observatory Threatened By Calif. Wildfire NPR

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

Daily Telegraph: A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.

China mines over 95pc of the world's rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.

Rare metals play a vital role in most cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons.

washingtonpost.com: When Jim Sanborn shows you his latest art, the jaw drops.

Over a three-year period Sanborn has created a fully operational electrostatic particle accelerator.

Throw the switch and 1 million volts of juice start flying down the tube. X rays zip off in every direction. Deafening zaps fill the air, and bolts of lightning spark around the metal sphere. Hunkered down in his lead-lined control booth, Sanborn can turn on his Geiger counters, turn up the power—and split the atom.

More impressive yet: Terrestrial Physics, as the new installation is called, is possibly the most substantial work of art to come out of Washington since the 1950s.

Physics Today: CyArk, a US nonprofit organization, and the US National Park Service are aiming to digitally preserve Mount Rushmore in South Dakota next month by scanning it with a series of laser beams. The three-dimensional model will be accurate to within 3mm.

The digital record will be created with technical and logistical support from the Scottish government department Historic Scotland and its partner, the Glasgow School of Art, as part of a broad international collaboration in developing preservation techniques for at-risk historical sites.

"While Mount Rushmore is a national icon in the US, there is expertise in other countries which can assist us to preserve it in a modern context," says Gerard Baker, superintendent at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, at a press conference announcing the deal.

The record is to help re-create the monument if it falls victim to a climate change, natural disaster, war, or terrorism.

Some historical artifacts have already been lost and scientists have been unable to re-create the original artifacts because of the lack of records. A classic example is Afghanistan's 2000-year-old Buddha statues in the Bamiyan province, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Other sites at risk include the Acropolis in Athens which is threatened by acid rain, and Machu Picchu in Peru.

CyArk's ultimate aim is to create 3D models of 500 threatened sites around the world.

Related Link
Historic Scotland Launch Scottish and International 3D Scanning Project

NPR: Is the rift closing between scientists and the general public? Sheril Kirshenbaum, co-author of Unscientific America, discusses the challenges of communicating about science and engineering, what scientists can do to help, and why science literacy is especially important today.

Physics Today: The Italian city of Venice is under threat of frequent flooding under the latest climate change scenarios, say Laura Carbognin at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Venice and colleagues in Climate Dynamics, and new expensive flood barriers may be unable to protect it.

Since the early part of the 20th century Venice has suffered a number of damaging floods, particularly in the 1960s. About four times a year St Mark's Square, the center point of the city, floods during a particularly high tide (about 110 cm according to the research paper).
The new €3 billion controversial flood barriers called Mo.S.E. is due to be completed by 2014. It will protect Venice from these high tides by sealing the city's lagoon off from the surrounding inlets.

The study calculates the tides that will effect Venice by combining land subsidence data from the city—Venice was built on a marsh, and the buildings have been sinking at 0.05 cm per year for sometime—and the latest forecasts on global sea-level rise from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Carbognin's team predict that by 2100, the tide will rise above 110 cm between 30 and 250 times a year, under the most conservative estimates, and that alternatives to Mo.S.E. will have to be considered to save the city. "The temporary closure of inlets alone could not be suitable to efficiently protect Venice from flooding," says the report.

One of the simplest suggestions is to refill the underground aquifers to "float" up the city from its surrounding area. A modeling study has offered "encouraging results," says Carbognin's team, that could rise the city by 30 cm over a 10-year period.

Related Link
Global change and relative sea level rise at Venice: what impact in term of flooding
Can Venice be raised by pumping water underground? A pilot project to help decide

Physics Today: In one of the first examples of embedding a video player into a print magazine, the US television network CBS has paid Entertainment Weekly to play a 40-minute video in the 18 September issue. Ironically the ad mentioned Physics Today.

The video, which is activated when the magazine page is opened for more than 5 seconds, opens with Jim Parsons, the actor who plays Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist on the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory, welcoming readers to "the current edition of Physics Today" before finding out he has been duped into supporting a different product.

Other parts of the page are touch sensitive to pull up additional content.

The advertisement is powered by technology similar to that used in a mobile phone. Designed by Los Angeles-based company Americhip, the video screen uses a 5 cm diagonal, 320x240 resolution, thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) says Americhips Bob Shaud. The display can be as large as 10 cm he adds, but the cost goes up significantly with larger displays.

The whole screen is only 2.7 mm thick and encased by polycarbonate to protect the display from damage. The remaining electronics are sandwiched behind the screen between two pieces of thick paper. The sound uses a similar chip to those found in electronic audio greeting cards. The battery lasts 65—70 minutes and can be recharged using a mini-usb connector.

The cost of embedding the video electronics is "more than a can of Pepsi," said CBS president of marketing George Schweitzer at a press conference earlier today, which is why only a small number of subscribers in New York and Los Angeles will receive the "video-in-print" ad, and why CBS managed to obtain additional sponsorship from the soft drinks manufacturer Pepsi. Paul Caine—president of the Time Inc. magazine group which publishes Entertainment Weekly—told the Wall Street Journal that it was in the "low teens."

"This is expensive technology," says Shoud "and the price per unit fluctuates depending on how many are ordered." A production run of 1,000 of these displays for a marketing campaign would lead to a cost per unit of about $50, increasing production to 100,000 units drops the price down to $20 he says.

In terms of educational use—such as embedding displays in textbooks—the pharmaceutical industry is evaluating whether the displays would be useful in providing doctors with instructions on how to use new drug examples.

Paul Guinnessy

NYTimes.com: The biggest opportunity to improve the nation's energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country's projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 %, a savings that would be "greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada."

New Scientist: The US government is launching a competition, which will run until the end of 2010, to find the best way of tracking pieces of junk down to the size of a pool ball. Three aerospace companies—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon—have each been awarded $30 million by US Air Force Space Command to design a "space fence" that will constantly report the motion of all objects 5 centimetres wide and larger in medium and low-Earth orbits.

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Space Debris
China Raises Stakes on Space Arms Race
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The Economist: Much has been made of the 400th anniversary this year of Galileo pointing a telescope at the Moon and jotting down what he saw (even though this had previously been accomplished by an Englishman, Thomas Harriot, using a Dutch telescope).

But 2009 is also the 400th anniversary of the publication by Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician and astronomer, of “Astronomia Nova.”

This was a treatise that contained an account of his discovery of how the planets move around the Sun, correcting Copernicus’s own more famous but incorrectly formulated heliocentric description of the solar system and establishing the laws for planetary motion on which Isaac Newton based his work.

Physics Today: President Barack Obama has awarded the highest US civilian honor—the Presidential Medal of Freedom—to Stephen Hawking.

In a speech before the presentation to Hawking and 15 other individuals Obama said:

Professor Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man and a mediocre student when he lost his balance and tumbled down a flight of stairs. Diagnosed with a rare disease and told he had just a few years to live, he chose to live with new purpose. And happily, in the four decades since, he has become one of the world's leading scientists. His work in theoretical physics—which I will not attempt to explain further here—has advanced our understanding of the universe. His popular books have advanced the cause of science itself. From his wheelchair, he's led us on a journey to the farthest and strangest reaches of the cosmos. In so doing, he has stirred our imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on Earth....

At a moment when cynicism and doubt too often prevail, when our obligations to one another are too often forgotten, when the road ahead can seem too long or hard to tread, these extraordinary men and women—these agents of change—remind us that excellence is not beyond our abilities, that hope lies around the corner, and that justice can still be won in the forgotten corners of this world. They remind us that we each have it within our powers to fulfill dreams, to advance the dreams of others, and to remake the world for our children.

Slate: Physicist and science-fiction fan Dave Goldberg is particularly sensitive to the pleasures of mind-bending time- traveling narratives. He's also sensitive to their flaws:

Most fictional accounts of time travel are rife with paradoxes, parallel universes, and plot holes that violate strict physical laws: Instead of exploring the limits of our understanding, they make a mockery of them.

That's why I'm so excited about the film adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, which tells the story of Henry DeTamble, a man with a rare genetic disorder that causes him to skip around in time while his long-suffering wife, Clare, waits for him at home. The premise is no more or less plausible than that of, say, Back to the Future, in which a tricked-out DeLorean must reach 88 mph to jump into the past. But The Time Traveler's Wife follows through on its premise in a realistic way.

A detailed hypothesis of how "realistic" time travel would work can be found at Slate.com.

New Scientist: A pack of private teams are racing to send robots to the Moon and claim the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize announced nearly two years ago.

So far 19 teams are registered for the contest, with two more teams—Quantum3 and SCSG—having withdrawn. To win, they must land a rover on the Moon that will then drive 500 meters before turning to photograph its landing site—all before the end of 2012. The team that does it first will pick up $20 million. Second place will earn $5 million and a further $5 million in bonuses will be awarded for finding relics from past US or Soviet Moon missions such as visiting the Apollo 11 landing site.

NPR: When you hear the name Oppenheimer, you probably think of Robert, the father of the atomic bomb. But there was also another physicist in the Oppenheimer family: Robert's younger brother, Frank.

The younger, perhaps less-known Oppenheimer is the subject of a new book by science writer K.C. Cole. In its pages, the enigmatic Frank Oppenheimer comes to life: the physicist and tinkerer, the chain smoker who kept a little bottle of whiskey in his desk, the pacifist who also worked on the atom bomb, the genial, smiling man with a sometimes unpredictable temper. But above all, you may know him best for his most lasting gift to society: the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the wonderful hands-on science center that he founded.

Ira Flatow talks to Cole about Frank Oppenheimer on NPR.

Related Link
Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up

Science: In 1997, physicists Imre Kondor of the Collegium Budapest and János Kertész of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics organized a conference on the budding field of econophysics, which has since enjoyed a mixed reputation. It is the biggest branch of complex-systems research, and physicists have flocked into finance. But many economists view econophysicists as dilettantes. "Shortly after this conference, I went to work in a bank, and I never met any animosity at all," Kondor says. "The reaction of the academic community has been markedly different than that of the practitioners."

WSJ.com: To conservator Sue Ann Chui at the Getty Museum, the 518-year-old wooden panel painting on her easel is a study in the subtle science of art.

Under scrutiny at her studio, the 15th-century masterwork depicting Madonna and Child is yielding its secrets to X-ray probes, ultraviolet scans, infrared reflectograms and molecular spectroscopy. The panel painting, like many thousands of others world-wide, was severely damaged by earlier efforts to preserve it. Ms. Chui is repairing the ravages of time and good intentions, while helping to turn a dying craft of panel conservation into material science.

"This specialization is a real rarity," says George Bisacca, a leading painting conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "It is in a curious spot between science, artisan skills and artistry, requiring very complicated judgment and knowledge from lots of different fields. That's why there are so few experts."

No more than half a dozen or so restoration specialists world-wide have the expertise for such sophisticated work, and most of them are nearing retirement. The only specialist training program for panel painting conservation, located in Florence, Italy, recently shut down. "It has created this vacuum in expertise," says Getty Conservation Institute scientist Alan Phenix.

The Atlantic: As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force.

Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part says The Atlantic's Graeme Wood.

Related Physics Today articles
Geoengineering: What, how, and for whom? February 2009
Will desperate climates call for desperate geoengineering measures? August 2008

BBC NEWS: America's first nuclear weapons production facility has become the center of a growing tourism industry.

More than 60 years after plutonium was first produced at Hanford, Washington State, the US government is running limited visits to the site.

Many locals are proud of their heritage, but Hanford has left another legacy: massive radioactive contamination.

And now billions of dollars of President Obama's stimulus money is being spent on cleaning up what is one of the most polluted places in the US.

Various: How do you map a city with no visible ruins?

In July 2007, during a severe drought, Paolo Mozzi, a geomorphologist at the University of Padua in Italy, and his team took aerial photos of Altinum, a Roman trading center that thrived between the 1st and 5th centuries CE, that lay beneath farm fields close to Venice, reports the BBC and ScienceNow. The photos were taken in several wavelengths of visible light and in near-infrared, with a resolution of half a meter.

When the images were processed to tease out subtle variations in plant water stress, a buried metropolis emerged. Lighter crops traced the outlines of buildings—including a basilica, an amphitheater, a forum, and what may have been temples—buried at least 40 centimeters below the surface. To the south of the city center runs a wide strip of riper crops. They were growing above what clearly used to be a canal, an indication that Venice's Roman forebears were already incorporating waterways into their urban fabric.

Related Links
The Map of Altinum, Ancestor of Venice Science
Maps reveal Venice 'forerunner' BBC
Ancient Roman City Rises Again ScienceNow

NPR: In the last century, space exploration was dominated by the superpowers and developed nations. This century, developing nations, particularly in Asia, have begun rolling out ambitious space programs.

Chief among them is China, which in 2003 became the third country after the US and the Soviet Union to put a human in space. China may be a latecomer to the field, but it has big plans.

Nature: Giovanni Bignami reflects on the people who persuaded him that we must send humans beyond Earth's orbit to inspire public and political support for science.

Science: In the field of complex socioeconomic systems, physicists and others analyze people almost as if they were interchangeable electrons. Can that approach decipher society and what ails it?

Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.

In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.

We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.

Various: The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing has led to widespread coverage in the media. Some articles and websites that may be of interest to Physics Today readers include:

• NASA's official 40th anniversary website, which combines all the major news releases connected to the anniversary and background information.




• The BBC's Apollo Moon landing subsite in which Richard Hollingham assesses the scientific reasons for going back to the Moon.
• Science magazine has made free a number of selected articles on the scientific results scientists made from the Apollo missions.

From the Physics Today archives:

• Reflections on the Moon (September 1969), an editorial by Editor-in-Chief R. Hobart Ellis Jr on the scientific impact of the Moon landing.
• Apollo 11 Success Brings Astronomy Down to Earth (September 1969), Physics Today looks at how—because of the Moon landings—astronomy had truly become "a laboratory science."
• NAS Panel Urges Greater Role in Apollo for Science (February 1970)
• The interior of the Moon (March 1974) Don L Anderson looks at the unexpected and confusing data brought back by the Apollo astronauts.
• Countries Race to Launch Moon Missions (February 2005), a look at the new space race to launch scientific instruments to the Moon.
• Finally, Freeman J. Dyson in October 1968 looked back at the first Orion project, a spaceship design that would bear the same relationship to the Saturn V rocket as "the majestic airships of the 1930's bore to the Boeing 707. The airships were huge, flimsy, with a payload absurdly small in comparison to their size, just like the Apollo ships."

Google Moon has a visual map of the landing site.

Above: The original video of the moment that the Apollo Eagle module landed on the Moon.

Space.com on how the Apollo program is influencing the design of the Orion capsule that will lead NASA's new efforts to return to the Moon. The main two differences says, NASA engineer Jiff Geffre, is the electronics—which allows for significant automation of the spacecraft's flight—and the endurance—Orion will be able to stay on the Moon for days instead of hours. This builds on work they have done for the space shuttle.

Nature interviews Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt—the first and last scientist to touch the lunar surface. Schmitt decrys the lack of geologists in the next batch of astronauts to go through training and expresses skepticism that the Moon was formed by the collsion of another body with the Earth. "The primary fact that makes me sceptical is that we know, from the group of samples brought back from the Moon called pyroclastic glasses, that there is a reservoir of volatile elements deep in the Moon that, under the hypothesis of a giant impact, should not be there," he says.

A series of opinion pieces on whether the US should return to the Moon, include commentary by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin:

What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we're celebrating. Not "do not choose to," but "can't."

By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of Lindbergh's epic transatlantic flight, thousands of people in jetliners retraced his route in comfort and safety every day. And on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, hundreds of satellites were orbiting the Earth.

Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

...At this 40th anniversary of Apollo, we need to ask ourselves a simple question: Do we want to have a real space program, or do we just want to talk about what we used to be able to do?

And from Tom Wolfe who points out that while Armstong walked on the Moon, NASA was already laying off scientists as funding for the Apollo program tapered off.

The reason why you have to dig a little bit back into the space race, says Wolfe, who describes the atmosphere and fear that existed in the US at the time of the 1957 launch of Sputnik:

Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, the Earth itself, plus the Earth’s own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious “three body problem” and then some. You’d have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets’ five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads....

...Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses — while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.

And apart from Wernher von Braun, there was no one who could successfully defend NASA against Congress on philosophical grounds, which was its undoing, says Wolfe.

Clara Moskowitz looks at why it is so hard to go back. This time NASA is aiming for a sustained human presence instead of short visits. Moreover, NASA's current rockets and space shuttles aren't capable of surpassing low-Earth orbit to reach the Moon with the amount of gear required for a manned expedition.

Speaking Sunday at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum (from the left in above image), NASA Mission Control creator Chris Kraft, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls).

The International Geophysical Year helped heat up the space race, said Armstrong, and provided a mechanism for engendering cooperation between former adversaries through the first Apollo–Soyuz meeting in space in 1975, to the later joint missions to Mir and the International Space Station. "In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for both sides," he said.

Paul Guinnessy

SPACE.com: History books tell us that the planet Neptune was found in the mid-1800s after years of speculation and search.

But in 1613, more than two centuries before Neptune was officially discovered, Galileo Galilei knew he had found it, according to a new theory by University of Melbourne physicist David Jamieson.

It has long been known that Galileo observed Neptune, but it was thought that he discounted the object as a star and gave it no further thought. But it turns out Galileo may have known the "star" had moved in relation to other stars, Jamieson reveals. That sort of movement would have caught Galileo's attention, since he knew that it was just the sort of thing planets did.

Salon.com: The experience of CERN in having to counter widespread but baseless public concerns about black holes consuming the Earth is, more broadly, the experience of science in our culture today, say Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Science is simultaneously admired and yet viewed as dangerously powerful and slightly malevolent—an uneasiness that comes across repeatedly in Hollywood depictions.

As science-fiction film director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator, Titanic) has observed, the movies tend to depict scientists "as idiosyncratic nerds or actively the villains."

That's not only unfair to scientists: It's unhealthy for the place of science in our culture—no small matter at a time of climate crisis, bioweapon threats, pandemic diseases, and untold future controversies that will surely erupt as science continues to dramatically change our world and our politics.

To begin to counter this problem, though, we need to wake up to a new recognition: Fixing the problem of science education in our schools, although very important, is not the sole solution. We also have to do something about the cultural standing of science—heavily influenced by politics and mass media—and that's a very different matter.

NYTimes.com: Spaceflight is now embedded in our culture, so much so that it is usually taken for granted—a far cry from the old days when the world held its breath for Alan B. Shepard Jr and John Glenn and watched, transfixed, the scene at Tranquility Base. That was then; no astronauts today are household names. Yet space traffic is thick and integral to the infrastructure of modern life.

John Noble Wilford looks back to the early days of spaceflight in which he wrote what he calls "the greatest story of my career 'Men Land on Moon."

Photos about the Moon can be found in their media blog, or track the history of the Apollo 11 mission in real time at WeChooseTheMoon.org, a web site that is re-creating the entire Apollo 11 trip as it happened.

Guardian.co.uk: As concerns increase in the UK about the "dumbing down" of science education, the government has launched a consultation on the new GCSE science curriculum. Unfortunately the consultation process is happening when nearly all the teachers are on holiday.

As Alom Shaha, a science teacher and filmmaker, says on the Guardian's website:

There are not enough students going on to study science at A-level. Top universities are complaining about the low standard of the few students who do choose to study science beyond school. There's a shortage of good science teachers.

These factors combine to create a crisis that has damaging implications for the future of British science and the economy. The QCA consultation is an opportunity for science teachers to play a role in improving things and I think as many science teachers as possible should take part.

In that regard Shaha has created a website www.howscience.co.uk to make an easier way for teachers and interested parents to contribute to the consultation.

Nature News: Indian universities are likely to find themselves under a new oversight body, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has announced.

Physicist Yash Pal led the committee that recommended setting up a six-member National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) to reform higher education. The commission would replace nearly a dozen regulatory bodies and bring all streams of higher education, including engineering, medicine, agriculture, and law, under its purview.

Various: An opera about string theory and five-dimensional space has premiered in Paris.

Hypermusic Prologue is a collaboration between composer Hèctor Parra and Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, who authored Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (Allen Lane, 2005), an account of cutting-edge physics, including string theory, and the likelihood that there exists additional spatial dimensions.

Randall says that the piece which is basically about two physicists, one of whom explores other dimensions, and one who stays at home. It tries to capture the competition in cutting edge science, the creativity in science as well as in art, says Randall in the above video. "It wasn't clear how to incorporate the ideas into an opera...it did turn into an exciting collaboration."

Baritone James Bobby and soprano Charlotte Ellett sang Randall's libretto, accompanied by musicians and technicians of the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain.

A review in Nature by Stefan Michalowski and Georgia Smith says that the singers and musicians gave "admirable performances, with flashes of startling beauty."

Hypermusic Prologue will be performed on 27–28 November at Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona, Spain, and on 6 December in the Grand Auditorium of the Philharmonie, Luxembourg.

Science: How will the US find the talent to fuel its clean-energy economy? Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has a solution—a 10-year, $1.7 billion education program called RE-ENERGYSE (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge)—and the physics Nobelist says there's no time to waste. But Congress may prefer to wait until next year.

NYTimes.com: In 2006, Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane in Basel, Switzerland, to look for geothermal energy—the heat simmering within Earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well—until December, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco. The New York Times article has worried residents. AltaRock Energy has published a response to the article on their web site.

Slate.com: With oil-sands production at more than 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada, which also produces conventional oil, has quietly passed Saudi Arabia to become the top supplier to the US.

US government analysts expect that production could triple again by 2030 and could eventually deliver to the US as much as 37% of imported crude.

The local environmental fallout—in terms of deforestation, water demand, and toxic waste—varies among the dozens of ongoing extraction projects but is often immense.

In other words, US policymakers are now faced with an awkward problem: How do you balance improvements in energy security with worsening climate change, especially when dealing with a resource that isn't yours?

Related Physics Today article
Physics in the oil sands of Alberta

The Guardian: Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a Royal Society report.

The report said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

Related Link
Towards a low carbon future

Physics Today: On Friday, the Democrats narrowly won passage in the House for the 1200-page American Clean Energy and Security Act by a 219–212 vote—two votes more than required.

The bill calls on the US to cut production of greenhouse gases by 17% of 1990 levels by 2020 and 83% by mid-century. Currently US greenhouse gas emissions are rising on average by 1% each year.

Despite statements on both sides of the aisle insisting that they want to combat climate change, a number of Republicans and Democrats have been mounting a rear-guard action to weaken the bill, particularly in its long and convoluted passage through the House Energy and Commerce committee.

The outcome depended on locking in the so-called "Blue Dog Democrats" and the number of moderate Republicans—despite pressure from Republican leadership to kill the bill (more).

In his weekly address President Obama hailed the bill and stated that he was looking forward to the Senate clearing passage "so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America's energy challenge and reclaim America's future."

"As this legislation moves to the Senate, it is also important to consider its international implications," says Eileen Claussen of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change . "Enactment of a comprehensive energy and climate bill along the lines of the ACES Act will finally allow the US to help lead the efforts toward a global agreement in which the major economies of the world, both developed and developing, play their part to address the climate challenge."

Related Links
House narrowly passes climate change bill Physics Today
House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change New York Times
Climate Change Activists Dismayed by Some of Bill's Provisions Washington Post

Times Online: Ever since the industrial revolution, science has driven the global economy. As a scientific nation, the UK is, by most indicators, second only to the US. But this is not fully reflected in our economic strength, so where have we gone wrong?

In these tough times, we are refocusing on how best to harness this strength to our national advantage. Political responsibility for nurturing our academic talent and for unlocking its economic benefit now rests with a single “super-ministry”: the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and particularly in the hands of Lords Mandelson and Drayson.

It seems clear in retrospect that this country was precariously overdependent on its financial sector; so the new ministry's aim should be to ensure that our science and engineering strength enables us to emerge from the downturn with a more diversified economy. There should plainly be special boosts for sectors ripe for exploitation—via, for instance, the Technology Strategy Board. But is important that long-term prospects—and the strength and breadth of the UK's academic base—should not be jeopardised.

The Observer: It is 40 years since the words, "The Eagle has landed," sent a thrill around the world. The Apollo moon missions were to herald a new dawn of space exploration, of lunar bases, manned missions to Mars, and more. But in the decades since—and after the shuttle disasters—America's appetite for interplanetary flight dwindled. The Moon landings marked not the beginning, but the end, of our space dreams, argues Robin McKie.

COSMOS magazine: Light pollution has caused 20% of the world's population —mostly in Europe, Britain and the US—to lose their ability to see the Milky Way in the night sky.

"The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona.

Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way."

New York Times: The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face inequalities in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report.

Nature News: This week, in the hallways of a conference in Guiyang, China, Nicola Pirrone—the director of Italy's CNR-Institute for Atmospheric Pollution Research—will be trying to rustle up more support for a global network to monitor mercury pollution.

Such a network would underlie a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) treaty to control mercury emissions, which negotiators plan to forge by 2013.

Researchers are facing a complex task—how to monitor 2,500 tonnes of mercury every year, more than half of which comes from fossil-fuel power plants—on what may be shoestring budgets.

But so far, global monitoring endeavors have been relatively uncoordinated; hundreds of sporadic efforts can include one-time samplings from a ship cruise or aeroplane flight.

London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former Nobel Prize winner.

Steinberger said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.

“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power—for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity—represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”

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.

Related Physics Today articles
Astronomers Save Historic Plates (June 2003)
North Carolina institute offers to archive old astronomy data (March 2009)

Bestjobsever: Mars Rover driver Tara Estlin programs the Rover's computers to tell it where to drive and how to maneuver its robotic arm. She and the team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab are using technology to answer some of today's most pressing scientific questions in planetary physics.

BBC NEWS: Boys outperform girls in school science in the UK more than in any other developed country, says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's new study of 15-year-olds from 57 countries. Surprisingly, the gender gap was the other way round in Turkey and Greece.

Nature News: The technology of incandescent lights has changed very little since Thomas Edison made it a commercial success in the 1880s.

Inside the bulb is a filament--tungsten in today's models--that is heated by the flow of electricity until it glows white and lights up the room. The design is simple, versatile, and cheap.

Nonetheless, that technology is now on the way out. In today's energy-hungry world, the devices are too wasteful: some 98% of the energy input ends up as heat instead of light. Halogen lamps, which look more high-tech, are not any better.

Multiply that waste by the number of incandescent bulbs in residential, industrial, and commercial settings -- an estimated 4 billion standard light sockets in the United States alone -- and it is clear why several countries are seeking to eliminate the bulbs entirely as a way to control carbon dioxide emissions.

It would be foolhardy to venture technological predictions for 2050. Even more so to predict social and geopolitical changes. The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.

But there are some trends that we can predict with confidence. There will, barring a global catastrophe, be far more people on Earth than today. Fifty years ago the world population was below 3 billion. It has more than doubled since then, to 6.7 billion. The percentage growth rate has slowed, but it is projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. The excess will almost all be in the developing world where the young hugely outnumber the old.

If population growth were to continue beyond 2050, one can't be other than exceedingly gloomy about the prospects. And the challenge of feeding such a rapidly growing population will be aggravated by climate change...

Physics Today: Herbert Frank York (24 November 1921-19 May 2009), an eminent nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, provided decades of advice to government on science and arms control issues, and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (1961-1964) died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego after a long illness. He was 87.

UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said, "Herb was not only a leader of UC San Diego, he also was a world leader and had a global impact. During his exceptional, long-standing career, he was the 'first' in many of the positions he held. Herb York made this campus and this world a better place. We will forever be grateful for his leadership and vision."

Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense under President Carter and one of York's closest friends, said, "Herb York's life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security. He played the leading role in creating a series of innovative and crucial institutions--a nuclear laboratory, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, a UC campus, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. In the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs. Beyond the public record, all of us who knew him as a friend appreciated his omnivorous interest in the world around him, dedication to his family, great sense of humor and zest for life; for us, the loss is both intensified and redeemed by our recognition of the model he provided."

"Herb and I have been friends since 1948 and our lives have been intertwined ever since," said Marvin Goldberger, former dean of UC San Diego's Division of Natural Sciences and former president of Caltech. "By the time Herb was only 28 years old, he had been appointed director of the Livermore Laboratory. That was the start of Herb's career of public service at the highest levels of government and academe. He was an effective voice for science within the White House and enormously effective as the first chancellor of UC San Diego."

Mark Thiemens, dean of UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences, noted "Herb is one of the most remarkable and influential scientists I have ever met. Whenever I pick up a book on the history of science policy in the United States, a history of the Manhattan Project, or a history of fundamental physics, Herb is featured prominently. He played an integral role in creating our nation's science agencies--the NSF, NASA and the Department of Energy--as well as an integral role in developing UC San Diego into a world renowned university."

Speaking for the family, York's oldest daughter, Rachel, said, "We are so grateful that Dad died in the embrace of the university he loved so very much, and was so very proud of."

UC's long association with York

York first came to the UC system in 1943 when he was recruited to join the staff of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) at Berkeley. Under the auspices of the UCRL, York was dispatched to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project, where a group of scientists designed the first atomic bomb - the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

In a memoir, York wrote that his contribution to the bomb's development had not been all that profound, but that he still felt triumphant: "Not only did we complete the project, but we ended the war."

Ending the war, or better yet, not starting one, was eventually to become a cause York advocated the better part of his life.

York received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in the same year, at the University of Rochester. At the end of World War II, York returned to UC Berkeley as a graduate student, received a doctorate in physics in 1949, stayed on as research physicist, then joined the physics department in 1951 as an assistant professor. Life in academia was short-lived, as once again he was recruited to a more urgent mission. From July 1952, to March 1958, York initiated and directed the UC Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, overseeing research programs which included development of the hydrogen bomb and other classified programs under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In March of 1958, York became the first chief scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, Washington, DC In December of that year, President Eisenhower appointed him the first director of Defense Research and Engineering, serving as civilian supervisor of missile and space research.

It was during these duties in the 1950s that York's belief that ending a war was done most effectively by not starting one sharpened, and turned him emphatically to arms control and to a nuclear test ban as a first step. "I was the only senior official who thought it (arms control and nuclear test ban) was a great idea," York later said. "Others were tolerant of it, but the majority thought it was really dumb."

York returned to academia in 1961 when UC established a campus in La Jolla. UC President Clark Kerr turned to York as someone with a solid record of administration and good rapport with the Board of Regents. York was named chancellor 17 February 1961, and assumed office in July that year.

In his slightly more than three years as UCSD chancellor, York worked with faculty committees planning to expand the campus. Though pleased with the tangible progress, York was less than gratified by the bureaucratic system of committee-based decision making and resigned in November of 1964 to return to teaching as a professor of physics, later chairing the Physics Department and serving as dean of graduate studies, 1969-1970.

An interest in arms control

York also was continuing in various capacities for the US government. He served as a member of the first General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, 1962-69; headed the US delegation to a UNESCO conference in 1965 on the application of science and technology; served as a member of the US delegation to Soviet-American Arms Control Talks, 1978-79, and served as US ambassador and chief negotiator for the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, 1979-81.

Opposition in both the United States and the Soviet Union scuttled the Geneva negotiations, and York later related his disappointment, but not surprise, saying that at that time: "The world situation just wouldn't support it."

In 1969, York started a long association with Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, by attending his first private meeting with Soviet counterparts to discuss arms control issues. "It is truly no understatement to say that Herb was one of the giants of the American national security and arms control communities," says Pugwash Executive Diretor Jeffrey Boutwell, "and few people embodied as he did the highest standards of intellectual rigor and passionate engagement for seeking what was best for our country and the world community."

Sandy Butcher, the official Pugwash historian, agrees by pointing to a 1971 quote from York, "[O]ur final goal must remain the ideal of general and complete disarmament.... Any reasonable extrapolation of history tells us that if we keep all those weapons around they will be used. While no one can say how to get from the present situation all the way to total nuclear disarmament, it is clear that throwing weapons away heads us in the right direction and building more weapons, be they MIRVs, ABMs, or SS-9s, heads us in the wrong direction. We have fussed too much and too long about fine structure. We must begin to focus on directions rather than details." (A Little Arms Control Can be a Dangerous Thing, War/Peace Report, August/September 1971, pp. 3 - 7).

Presidential Adviser

York also was adviser to six US presidents on arms and armament, and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the scientific advisory boards of the Army and the Air Force.

The scholar and university administrator again served as chancellor of UC San Diego on an interim basis from 1970 to 1972. In contrast to his first term as founding chancellor, before the first students had even been accepted, York relished the short interim chancellorship made sweeter by the fact that "we had real students, and it was a real university."

Following the second chancellorship, York taught physics and served as director of the Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs, 1973-88. In 1983 York founded and directed the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), which conducts research and seminars on conflict resolution and promotes international efforts to avoid war. In 1989 he became director emeritus.

He also served as advisor to the president of UC and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the future of the nuclear labs.

Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former UC San Diego Chancellor, said, "Herb played a key role in the development of nuclear weapons and more importantly, in defining the nation's policy on such weapons. As the first chancellor of UC San Diego he set the standard for excellence and the university's subsequent development as a great research university. His contributions at the national level and in San Diego are truly legendary."

Among his numerous awards were:

   * The 2000 Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in higher education, the highest honor bestowed by UC Berkeley's Academic Senate.

   * The 2000 Enrico Fermi Award for his efforts and contributions in nuclear deterrence and arms control agreements, presented by President Clinton in Washington DC The Fermi Award is the government's oldest science and technology award honoring lifetime achievement.

   * The 2000 Vannevar Bush Award for leadership in the arms control movement and work in nuclear energy, presented by the National Science Board, the policymaking arm of the National Science Foundation.

   * Also, the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award, 1994; the Federation of American Scientists' Public Service Award, 1993, and the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award, 1962.

York was the author of six books: Arms Control (Readings from Scientific American, 1973); The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and Superbomb (1976); Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (1978); Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to Geneva (1987); A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative (1988); and Arms and the Physicist (1994).

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sybil, whom he met at Berkeley, and three children: Rachel York, Dr. Cynthia York, David Winters, and four grandchildren.

Arrangements for a memorial service at UC San Diego are pending.

In lieu of flowers, the York family suggests donations in Herb's memory be made to the "Herb York Memorial Fund. "Donations can be made online at www.givetoucsd.ucsd.edu by indicating in the comment section Herb York Memorial Fund.

Related Links
Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader LA Times
Herbert York, 87, Top Nuclear Physicist Who Was Arms Control Advocate, Dies New York Times

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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Details of Texas Tech University's Iraq research grant

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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Times Online: When, five years ago, he shared the £480,000 Abel Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel prize in the world of mathematics, Sir Michael Atiyah might have listened to his wife's urgings to put his feet up and settle into a comfortable life. But that would not have been his style. "Some mathematicians retire," he concedes with a smile. "I don't think I have."

To celebrate Sir Michael's 80th birthday and a life dedicated to science and political activism, the University of Edinburgh hosted a three-day conference last month on his contribution to geometry and physics.

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But the US$500-million plan has found one of its most difficult tasks on the surface. It has struggled to meet goals to work with local Native Americans, whose cooperation is vital to keeping the project on track. A federal review this year questioned whether DUSEL would create educational and outreach opportunities for local tribes; if not, it could face lawsuits, delays, or other major problems.

Matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, releasing energy according to Einstein's famous formula E=mc². This tells us that one pound of antimatter is equivalent to around 19 megatons of TNT. There is the slight issue of containment - the antimatter has to be kept in a complete vacuum and prevented from touching the walls of the container. But once you've solved that one you can go out and wreak havoc... just as soon as you've got your antimatter.

And there's the big problem. In Angels & Demons, the antimatter is stolen from CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center. And it's true—scientists there really have produced antimatter. But only in submicroscopic quantities. "If you add up all the antimatter we have made in more than 30 years of antimatter physics here at CERN, and if you were very generous, you might get 10 billionths of a gram," CERN's Rolf Landua told New Scientist magazine. "Even if that exploded on your fingertip it would be no more dangerous than lighting a match."

Environmental News Network: A two-day workshop was held this week (May 11–12) between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Japan's Ministry of Environment (MOEJ), and Japan's Institute for Global Environmental Strategies to discuss key climate change issues.

Today, claims the thinktank Civitas in a collection of essays published to mark the 50th anniversary of Snow's lecture, we face a far worse crisis than the one Snow outlined. In the end, he was talking about a difference in tone and style among groups of highly educated people. Now, say the authors of From Two Cultures to No Culture, the very survival of serious education is at stake.

AFP: Austria is pulling out of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Science Minister Johannes Hahn announced Thursday, citing budget concerns.

Austrian physicist Daniel Grumiller published an open letter about the importance of CERN to Austrian science and called himself "speechless" at the decision. He notes that 173 Austrian scientists are now actively working at CERN.

Using interferometry--subtracting one picture from the other--Italian scientists overlaid the two radar pictures of the region to produce a map of colored waves.

Each colored ring is a measure of how much the ground has moved as a result of the earthquake.

The large green square represents the location of the main shock; the smaller green squares show large aftershocks. Along the yellow line east of L’Aquila geologists found an alignment of surface breaks after the quake, which indicate the orientation of the rupture. The colored wave pattern follows those breaks exactly, indicating that the ground had moved a few inches down to the left side of the yellow line. This movement is also represented by the black and white fault plane solution on the left.

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If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. "We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

At the time, some observers put the odds of such an event occurring at millions, maybe billions, to one.

But experts had been warning for years that useable space was becoming crowded, boosting the possibility of a serious collision

To say that he was excited would be an understatement. As an astronaut, Dr. Grunsfeld had twice journeyed to space to make repairs on humanity’s most vaunted eye on the cosmos, experiences he had described to a high-level panel pondering Hubble’s fate only a few months before as the most meaningful in his life. He was looking forward to leading the third and final servicing mission, which had been delayed by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew the year before.

Thinking that the mission was now being scheduled, Dr. Grunsfeld raced to Washington, only to learn that Sean O’Keefe, NASA’s administrator, had canceled it on the ground that it was too risky. Wearing his other hat as NASA’s chief scientist, Dr. Grunsfeld now had the job of telling the world that the space agency was basically abandoning its greatest scientific instrument at the same time that it was laying plans for the even riskier and more expensive effort to return humans to the Moon.

He said he felt as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.

“Being an astronaut, there are not a lot of things that have really shocked me in my life,” Dr. Grunsfeld said in a recent interview. But, he added, “I don’t think anybody could ever prepare themselves for, you know, trying to bury something that they have said, ‘Hey, this is worth risking my life for.’ ”

He went home that January night and wondered whether he should resign.

On May 12, he and six other astronauts commanded by Scott Altman are scheduled to ride to the telescope’s rescue one last time aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This will be the fifth and last time astronauts visit Hubble. When the telescope’s batteries and gyros finally run out of juice sometime in the middle of the next decade, NASA plans to send a rocket and drop it into the ocean.

If all goes well in what Dr. Grunsfeld described as “brain surgery” in space, Hubble will be left at the apex of its scientific capability. As chief Hubble repairman for the past 18 years, he has been intertwined with the Hubble telescope physically, as well as intellectually and emotionally. “He might be the only person on Earth who has observed with Hubble and touched Hubble,” said Bruce Margon, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Sarkar is one of thousands of highly skilled scientists, professors and technology workers from Beijing to Belarus who have been stranded in their home countries in recent months, upsetting their lives, their jobs and their children's schooling. Many wonder whether the United States still wants its foreign scientists.

To avoid hanging separately, say scientists and managers in the United States and Europe, the two agencies must agree to hang together in an unprecedented partnership. This summer they intend to unveil a sweeping plan for a decade of collaboration that could kick off with a joint 2016 mission and culminate a decade later in the return of a martian sample to Earth. "This is a big change," says David Southwood, ESA science chief. "But we have to think about Mars differently." Adds his counterpart at NASA, Edward Weiler: "We've got to do this together."

Physics Today: Updated 4/8/2009 An earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale hit central Italy at 1:32 GMT. last night causing thousands of people to lose their homes more than 250 deaths (see USGS map below).   "It was felt across the whole of Italy, but most strongly in central Italy," said Stuart Sipkin, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey's (USGS's) National Earthquake Information Center.

The region had experienced a large number of minor tremors over the past four months, including a 4.0-magnitude event on 30 March.

Most of the damage surrounds the city of L'Aquila, which includes one of the oldest centers of learning in Europe, the University of L'Aquila. More than 4,000 buildings in the city have collapsed.

"We did know there would be quite a lot of damage because of the USGS Pager (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response) system," said Sipkin. "We can take our estimates of ground shaking and basically overlay this on a population density map, and we could see that [with the earthquake] a lot of people were exposed to large ground shaking," he added.

Enzo Boschi, the chairman of Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology, (INGV) told ANSA, an Italian news service, that the damage was extensive because the buildings were not designed to withstand earthquakes.

According to the New York Times, one of the four-story-high student dormitories collapsed, with one person dead and several missing. "This shouldn't have happened," said Gabriele Magrini, a physics student at the university. He told the New York Times that he was lucky enough to have been at a friend's house when the quake struck and that he had been waiting at the university since 4am, adding, "We've only seen two people come out. We're still waiting for 10."

Geographical history

Italy is a well-known complex earthquake zone, said Sipkin. "It's not a simple area like the West Coast of California where you have two large plates sliding against each other along the San Andreas fault.... You have the collision of Africa and Europe, its highly fractured and broken up, there's a lot of microplates moving around, which creates a lot of different types of fault action. This particular fault zone usually gives extensional earthquakes, but there's lots of different types of earthquakes that could happen."

There is a major fault line that runs north–south along Italy's Apennine Mountain Range and a minor east–west faultline that runs across the center of the country that produces frequent small earthquakes.

According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake struck at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), with an epicenter approximately 95 kilometers (60 mi) north–east of Rome, close to L'Aquila. The city has experienced major earthquakes in the past, but nothing on this scale since 1703.

"The duration of ground shaking depends on where you are. If you're on a hard surface, it ends pretty quickly, but if you're in a sedimentary built-up valley, then it would last longer," said Sipkin.

Two smaller quakes—(one at 4.8 on the Ritcher scale)—had hit the region the day before, which weakened many buildings before the main earthquake hit. Smaller aftershocks, which frequently occur after a significant earthquake, are still continuing.

''It was a common tremor for the Apennine mountain chain, one which occurs when underground shelves shift by ten centimeters or so,'' said Boschi. But it is impossible to predict when such tremors will happen, Boschi told ANSA, ''because the parameter variables change constantly. However, in the near future there should be no other ones similar in magnitude to the one last night, although we can expect aftershocks to continue in addition to the over 100 we have already recorded."

Controversy has erupted over Italian television reports that Gioacchino Giuliani, a laboratory technician, had predicted the