Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter. That’s what five-dozen Jefferson Lab researchers were counting on for an experiment in Hall A

Albert Einstein figured it out by 1905, as he was formulating his special theory of relativity: while you can’t exactly get something from nothing, you can come close. His famous formula, E=MC 2 , works both ways. Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter.

That’s

Models of Larch budmoth outbreaks in the European Alps may eventually show scientists how to model a variety of disease and insect eruptions that rely on a combination of enemy, host and spatial movement to decimate populations, according to a team of ecologists.

“We use theoretical models to help understand the spatial component in these outbreaks and to predict how spatial spread occurs,” says Dr. Ottar N. Bjornstad, assistant professor of entomology and biology at Penn State. “With local

Nitric oxide is a natural part of the body’s immune defense. Linköping University researcher Thomas Schön has studied this compound in connection with the skin disease leprosy and the lung disease tuberculosis. The Swedish researcher has found that nitric oxide probably contributes to the disease in the case of leprosy but, on the other hand, plays a positive role in protecting against tuberculosis. This role can be reinforced by adding a supplement of arginine, which is found in peanuts, for example

Astronomers have been puzzled for decades as to how the rings of hot gas surrounding certain types of star are formed. Now a team of scientists from the Universities of Glasgow and Wisconsin believe they have found the answer. The team studied a type of young, hot star, known as a “Be star”, that has a disk of glowing gas around it, similar to the rings surrounding Saturn. Until now, no one has been able to account for how these rings form but in a paper published this month*, the team suggest an ans

Using a technique based on the work of the 1902 Nobel Prizewinner, Pieter Zeeman, an international team of astronomers have, for the first time, provided conclusive proof that the magnetic field close to a number of aging stars is 10 to 100 times stronger than that of our own Sun. These observations suggest a solution to the long outstanding problem as to how, at the end of their lives, a perfectly spherical star can give rise to the complex and often far from spherical structure seen in the resultin

VLT UVES Observes Most Metal-Deficient Star Known [1]
A faint star in the southern Milky Way, designated HE 0107-5240, has been found to consist virtually only of hydrogen and helium. It has the lowest abundance of heavier elements ever observed, only 1/200,000 of that of the Sun – 20 times less than the previous record-holding star.

This is the result of a major ongoing research project by an international team of astronomers [2] . It is based on a decade-lon