American Institute of Physics: Physics Today News Picks

Physics Today News Picks

• Stephen Hawking’s Big Bang theory
  Guardian: Was there one big bang that created the universe? Or many bangs, scattered through space and time, and therefore, many universes? In the Guardian, Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies discusses Stephen Hawking’s recent book, The Grand Design (Bantam,...
  
  
• Creating a comprehensive climate databank
  Nature: Today through Thursday, a workshop is being held in Exeter, UK, to discuss how to create a comprehensive climate databank. Although the climate-science community has discussed creating such a databank for years, it was last year's incident involving the...
  
  
• US climbs on board high-speed-train proposal
  New York Times: For years, several US states have been proposing building high-speed-train networks on a par with those of Spain, Japan, and China. At long last those plans may come to fruition as the US government is finally putting...
  
  
• CERN to start patenting its inventions
  New Scientist: Despite having been responsible for some very innovative technology, CERN has not until now attempted to patent its inventions. Responsible for the touchscreen and the World Wide Web, CERN is only now working with the United Nations’ World...
  
  
• When one bad apple threatens science
  Chronicle: In the review section of this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Ruse, who directs the program in the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University, compares the recent cases of two individuals who fell from grace...
  
  
• Is supersolidity a real effect?
  Nature: At low temperatures and high pressure, helium completely solidifies, or does it? In 2004 Eun-Seong Kim and Moses Chan of the Pennsylvania State University found evidence of a phase within frozen He that appeared to flow through the solid...
  
  
• Magnus effect responsible for great soccer goal
  Science: A group of French researchers has been studying the “impossible” goal scored by Brazilian soccer player Roberto Carlos during the 3 June 1997 match with France because it is a practical example of the Magnus effect. During the game,...
  
  
• NASA plans to send a probe into the Sun's outer corona
  SPACE.com: NASA's Solar Probe Plus, scheduled to launch no later than 2018, is designed to study the Sun's outer atmosphere. Five science experiments were chosen from thirteen proposals to fly on the spacecraft, which is being built at the Johns...
  
  
• Committee recommends that Fermilab keep seeking Higgs boson
  Science: An independent committee of researchers has recommended that Fermilab’s 25-year-old Tevatron particle collider keep running through 2014, rather than shut down in September 2011 as planned. Fermilab is the only US lab that stands a chance of beating its...
  
  
• Fresh Air for Sale, in Hong Kong
  New York Times: Hong Kong’s Clean Air Network, a nongovernmental activist group, has created an infomercial spoof that purports to offer canisters of fresh air to the city’s smog-plagued residents. The Cantonese-language version has had more than 143 000 views on...
  
  
• When did volcanoes smooth out the craters of Venus?
  Nature: Compared with Mars, Mercury, and the Moon, Venus shows little surface cratering. Vulcanism and other active crustal processes must have rubbed out the ancient craters, but when? Previous theories posited a violent phase of Venusian vulcanism that ended no...
  
  
• A cheaper way to extract hydrogen fuel from water
  New Scientist: Several groups of researchers have been working toward deriving energy from sunlight and water—much as plants do. A team at MIT found a revolutionary way to split a water molecule into oxygen gas and hydrogen ions, which required...
  
  
• Nobelists support White House space plan
  New York Times: Fourteen Nobel laureates, including three whose prize-winning work involved data gathered by NASA instruments, have joined other prominent US scientists in signing a letter supporting President Obama's plan for space exploration. The letter was sent yesterday to...
  
  
• Greenpeace activists shut down Arctic oil rig
  The Independent: Yesterday, four Greenpeace activists shut down an oil drilling operation in the Arctic. Using inflatable speedboats to evade authorities, the four, who are all expert climbers, then climbed 15 m up the Cairn Energy oil rig off Greenland,...
  
  
• Two Chinese satellites have deliberate close encounter
  New Scientist: Two Chinese satellites had a close rendezvous 600 km above Earth, and may even have touched, a first for any country besides the US, according to Brian Weeden, a technical consultant at the Secure World Foundation, which promotes...