Physics and Astronomy

CSIRO’s radio telescopes and others in Australia, China, Japan and the USA have revealed how the wind speeds on Saturn’s moon Titan vary with altitude-and have turned a disappointment into a triumph.

As the Huygens probe plummeted through Titan’s atmosphere on 14 January it transmitted a stream of data to its parent Cassini spacecraft. The ground-based radio telescopes ’eavesdropped’ on the probe’s signal. As the probe was buffeted by Titan’s w

Scientists have produced an audio soundbite that captures what the Cassini orbiter heard from Huygens as the probe descended on Titan on Jan. 14.

The sounds may not be music to everyone’s ears, but they’re beautiful, interesting and important to investigators who are reconstructing the probe’s exact position and orientation throughout its parachute dive to Titan’s surface. “The minute-long sound file covers about four hours of real time, from when the Huygen

Find provides evidence of earliest known use of diamond and sapphire by prehistoric people

Researchers have uncovered strong evidence that the ancient Chinese used diamonds to grind and polish ceremonial stone burial axes as long as 6,000 years ago -– and incredibly, did so with a level of skill difficult to achieve even with modern polishing techniques. The finding, reported in the February issue of the journal Archaeometry, places this earliest known use of diamond worldwide

The Novosibirsk researchers have developed a device capable of producing mist with support from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE). The precise name of the device is “field device for measuring liquid and gas velocities”. It helps to perform prompt, precise and, most importantly, simultaneous measuring of the velocity at any point of the fluid and gas flow.

“Field device for measuring liquid and gas ve

Nanotubes are ubiquitous in the world of science. Although several methods for making them exist, little is known about how these techniques physically produce the hollow fibers of carbon molecules known as nanotubes, that is until now. A multinational team of scientists has discovered that multi-walled carbon nanotubes made by the pure carbon arc method are, in fact, carbon crystals that form inside drops of glass-coated liquid carbon. The research appears in the 11 February 2005, issue of the

A new measurement by a student and professor at the University of Rochester has shed new light on the limits of scientists’ standard model of physics. Doctoral student Ben Kilminster and Kevin McFarland, professor of physics, used the particle accelerator at Fermilab to conduct the first measurement ever done with enough precision to discern certain characteristics of how the top quark, the heaviest particle in known physics, decays. The work is reported in today’s issue of Physical Re