Astatine is among the world’s rarest elements – with a maximum half-life of just eight hours, found in tiny amounts in natural radioactive decay chains, but also produced by bombarding bismuth with energetic atomic particles. The late Dale Corson, Cornell’s eighth president, was one of the discoverers of astatine, synthesizing it for the first time with Kenneth McKenzie and Emilio Segre in 1940.
Building a neutrino telescope — a unique instrument that detects extremely small, high energy particles — out of 5,000 optical sensors embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, a tremendous engineering feat, was just the first challenge.
Bonn astronomers discover how the image of a distant quasar splits into multiple images by the effects of a cloud of ionized gas in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Such events were predicted as early as in the 1970s, but the first evidence for one now has come from observations performed with the telescope array VLBA and analysed in the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Thought only Google and Nasa had quantum computers? A first-of-its-kind project unveiled today, will allow you free, global access to a miniature quantum processor chip via the internet.
The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) awards grants to “catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology”. The grant awarded to Emerson and his collaborators was one of 37 applications selected for funding this year from a total of 211 initial applications that were submitted by institutions, universities, colleges, laboratories, think tanks and businesses from around the world.
NASA's black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has "bagged" its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.
Much like the particles he studies, University of Cincinnati graduate student Fady Bishara is an object in motion. He moved to the U.S. from Egypt at 17 years old, studied engineering in Cleveland and moved to Cincinnati a few years after graduation for a job. While here he decided to move from engineering to study theoretical physics.
In 2012, Astronomy & Astrophysics published a statistical study of the isotopic records of solar activity, in which Abreu et al. claimed that there is evidence of planetary influence on solar activity. A&A is publishing a new analysis of these isotopic data by Cameron and Schüssler. It corrects technical errors in the statistical tests performed by Abreu et al. They find no evidence of any planetary effect on solar activity.
Physicists from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg have reached an important milestone and have made the first South African contribution of a “piece of hardware” to the ATLAS Experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization of Nuclear Research (CERN).
Astronomers using a worldwide network of radio telescopes have found strong evidence that a powerful jet of material propelled to nearly light speed by a galaxy's central black hole is blowing massive amounts of gas out of the galaxy. This process, they said, is limiting the growth of the black hole and the rate of star formation in the galaxy, and thus is a key to understanding how galaxies develop.
Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are - some evidence suggested they could be room temperature.
Data from NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft reveal that neutral interstellar atoms are flowing into the solar system from a different direction than previously observed.
The University of Southampton is launching the largest photonics and electronics institute in the UK on Thursday 12 September.
After decades of searching for the Higgs boson, a theoretical subatomic particle that is a cornerstone of the structure of matter, international scientists announced in July 2012 that they had evidence of its existence.
In all the centuries that humans have studied chemical reactions, just 36 basic types of reactions have been found. Now, thanks to the work of researchers at MIT and the University of Minnesota, a 37th type of reaction can be added to the list.
By David L. Chandler
5 Sep 2013