Physics and Astronomy

As the UK prepares to celebrate Einstein Year in 2005, a physicist from Bristol University is looking for stories that can be used to tell taxi drivers what physics is all about. Sir Michael Berry, whose own father was a London cabbie, thought of the idea after failing to give a taxi driver a clear explanation of what it is that physicists actually do. Berry realized that physicists need a stock of good and convincing stories that show how physics affects people’s lives. Looking back, he now

A big advantage of space robots is that they need neither food nor drink and can support very inhospitable conditions. More important still, although expensive to design and produce, their loss is always preferable to that of an astronaut. At this month’s ASTRA 2004 workshop robots designed in ESA’s space research and technical centre in the Netherlands attracted much attention.

“On Earth, robots regularly take over when it comes to repetitive tasks or when human health ma

If you run into Ed Saff at a cocktail party and ask him what he does for a living, the mathematician is likely to reply that he is working on a “method for creating the perfect poppy-seed bagel.” Then he’ll pause and add, “Maybe that’s not the most accurate description, but it’s the most digestible.”

More accurately, Saff, who is a mathematics professor at Vanderbilt, has been working with his colleague Associate Professor of Mathematics Doug Hardin to come up with a new and improv

New observations of an oddball planetary system 150 light-years from Earth may force astronomers to rethink the textbook definition of a planet and the accepted idea about how such a body forms. The observations suggest that either some planets are superheavy or that planets can form from disks of gas and dust that encircle not just a single star but two starlike objects.

Two years ago, when astronomers at the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, reported their findings on

A team of Danish physicists has taken a crucial step towards an Internet that is faster and more secure than what we know today. The researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have created an atomic memory that, in time, will be able to break the limits for Internet communication. The team’s breakthrough was published in the prominent journal, Nature, on 25 November 2004.

From Internet to Quantum Internet

The Internet is getting faster

MiniGRAIL: first spherical gravitational wave antenna in the world

Since last week, Professor Giorgio Frossati of Leiden University’s Institute of Physics can ‘listen’ to gravitational waves. That is, if such a wave happens to come along. Gravitational waves originate from violent clashes between black holes in the universe and from instabilities in neutron stars.

MiniGRAIL is the name of the first spherical gravitational wave antenna in the world. The ball was made at t