Some slow, cold visitors stopped by Los Alamos National Laboratory last week, and their arrival could prove a godsend to physicists seeking a better theory of everything.
Researchers working at the University of Californias Los Alamos Neutron Science Center and eight other member institutions of an international collaboration took a giant step toward their goal of constructing the most intense source of ultra-cold neutrons in the world, measuring ultra-cold neutron production in
Unwanted, pulled or poisoned, the lowly weed is sometimes better than its highly touted “herbal” cousins for preventing and curing a host of diseases, according to University of Florida research.
“If I had one place to go to find medicinal plants, it wouldnt be the forest,” said John Richard Stepp, a UF anthropologist who did the study. “There are probably hundreds of weeds growing right outside peoples doors they could use.”
Stepp combed through scientific journals an
When ESA’s Huygens spaceprobe, travelling on board NASAs Cassini spacecraft en route to Saturn, lands on the planets largest moon Titan in January 2005, not only will it carry a variety of scientific instruments, but also music ‘made in Europe’.
Four musical themes composed by French musicians Julien Civange and Louis Haéri were placed on board ESA’s Huygens probe in October 1997. After a seven-year and 4000 million kilometre journey, the music will reach Titan on 14 January 200
On June 8 Earth-based solar telescopes will follow a tiny black orb as it appears to travel effortlessly across a wrinkled, brilliant sea. Timothy Brown, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will not sit idly by as Venus traverses the Sun for the first time in 122 years at an angle visible from Earth. Peering through a specialized solar telescope in the Canary Islands, Brown will study the chemical composition and winds of Venus’s upper atmosphere, a region poorly ob
The experiment, titled “Quark Propagation through Cold QCD Matter,” began its run in December 2003 and wrapped up in early March. It probed Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a fundamental theory of particle physics that describes the interactions of quarks and gluons — the basic building blocks of matter. A property of QCD, called confinement, states that no quark can ever be found alone. Instead, quarks combine in pairs or triplets to make up larger particles. For instance, every proton and neutron cont
Hundreds of Maunder minimum stars are not, say UC Berkeley astronomers
A mysterious 17th century solar funk that some have linked to Europes Little Ice Age and to global climate change, becomes even more of an enigma as a result of new observations by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers.
For 70 years, from 1645 until 1714, early astronomers reported almost no sunspot activity. The number of sunspots – cooler areas on the sun that appear dark against the brig