Nov 18th, 2008 · Chinese-born physicist Shu Quan-Sheng Monday pleaded guilty before a US court to violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting American military space know-how to China. The 68-year-old naturalized US citizen, pictured here on his company …
Nov 16th, 2008 · An international team of physicists has applied the ideas of cloaking to the quantum world and worked out how to hide quantum objects such as molecules. In the quantum world, seeing is equivalent to detecting a quantum object. In the case of molecules, …
Nov 6th, 2008 · All invisibility cloaks to date work by hiding an object embedded inside them. Now a group of physicists have worked out how to remotely cloak objects that sit outside a cloaking material. The trick is to make the cloaking material with optical properties …
Nov 6th, 2008 · A UK bookmaker has lowered the odds on proving that god exists to just 4-1 to coincide with the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider. The chance that physicists might discover the elusive sub-atomic object called the "God particle" has forced the …
Oct 25th, 2008 · Wired reports on the Enriched Xenon Observatory 200, a particle detector scientists hope will answer the question of why there is significantly more matter than antimatter in the universe. Quoting: "The new detector will try to fill in the picture, determining …
Oct 23rd, 2008 · Fifty years ago, before 'Pong' and 'Space Invaders,' a nuclear physicist created 'Tennis for Two,' a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever. Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, …
Oct 12th, 2008 · Forcing sulfur atoms into silicon using femtosecond laser pulses creates a material called 'black silicon' that is 100 to 500 times more sensitive to light than conventional silicon, in both the visible and infrared spectrums, according to SiOnyx, a venture-funded …
Oct 8th, 2008 · Last week the free and open access repository for scientific (mainly physics but also math, computer sciences...) papers arXiv got past 50,0000 different papers, not counting older versions of the same article. Especially for physicists it is the number …
Oct 7th, 2008 · The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa …
Oct 7th, 2008 · The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been jointly awarded to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago 'for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.' and Makoto Kobayashi of the KEK lab and Toshihide Maskawa …
Oct 6th, 2008 · Science News reports on a paper to be published in Physical Review Letters in which an international team of researchers describes their computer simulation of the most violent collision imaginable: two black holes colliding head-on at nearly light-speed. …
Sep 29th, 2008 · Just when you thought it was safe to switch on the LHC (though it won't be for a while yet), another nightmare scenario has emerged that some critics worry could cause the particle accelerator to explode. The culprit this time is not an Earth-swallowing …
Sep 29th, 2008 · New Scientist is reporting on a lab-scale experiment that may lead to a tsunami invisibility cloak, which could protect islands, open-ocean platforms and even coastlines from dangerous waves by effectively making them invisible to tsunamis. The technology …
Sep 22nd, 2008 · Wietse Venema started out as a physicist, but became interested in the security of the programs he wrote to control his physics experiments. He went on to create several well-known network and security tools, including the Security Administrator's Tool …
Sep 4th, 2008 · Physicists have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b. The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass. This …
Aug 29th, 2008 · We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain two puzzling experiments from the …
Aug 19th, 2008 · A small subculture of amateur physicists and science-fiction fans — fewer than 100 worldwide — are building working nuclear-fusion reactors at home. The designs are based on the work of Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, from …
Aug 16th, 2008 · An anonymous reader sends in a Science News article that begins: "Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway …
Aug 6th, 2008 · One of the cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon's theory of communication, which he published in 1948. If you've ever made a phone call, watched TV, or used a computer, you've got Shannon to thank for describing how information can be moved …
Jul 18th, 2008 · schliz writes to mention that a team of quantum physicists have demonstrated how to significantly reduce the effects of "stiction", or the tendency for two very small, very close objects to stick together as a result of Casimir force. ""The Casimir force …
