Category: Physics and Numbers
In recent years, the government has made moves to support making the results of taxpayer-funded research available to taxpayers for free. A new bill in Congress attempts to pull the plug.
As I wrote recently, Stephen Quake has been writing about conflicts of interest in research over at The Wild Side blog. He proposes solving these problems with peer review. I like the article, and he has many thoughtful things to say on the topic, but I don't really understand this proposal.
The problem of conflicts of interest in science is not going to go away.
What's in the Stimulus Package for science?
An international team of scientists led by a Princeton University group recently discovered that on the surface of certain materials collective arrangements of electrons move in ways that mimic the presence of a magnetic field where none is present.
During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.
Your refrigerator’s humming, electricity-guzzling cooling system could soon be a lot smaller, quieter and more economical thanks to an exotic metal alloy discovered by an international collaboration working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR).
A team of Los Alamos researchers led by Victor Klimov has shown that carrier multiplication—when a photon creates multiple electrons—is a real phenomenon in tiny semiconductor crystals and not a false observation born of extraneous effects that mimic carrier multiplication.
When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? Recent measurements of an international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy provide the first concrete evidence that star-forming regions in infant galaxies are indeed small - but also hyperactive, producing stars at astonishingly high rates.
Researchers searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics: A holographic universe.
In the world of nanomaterials, scientists and engineers can create new structures with tiny building blocks as small as one billionth of a meter.
Physicists have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.
A newly developed mathematical model that figures out the best strategy to win the popular board game CLUE© could some day help robot mine sweepers navigate strange surroundings to find hidden explosives.
The principle behind whispering galleries -- where words spoken softly beneath a domed ceiling or in a vault can be clearly heard on the opposite side of the chamber -- has been used to achieve what could prove to be a significant breakthrough in the miniaturization of lasers.
For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.
