Global Mobility: Science Mapped Out
A special issue of Nature examines the changing global landscape of research.
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Digging Up the Early Universe
Cosmologists are uncovering relics from the dawn of time, letting them look back almost all the way to the Big Bang.
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A Nobel That Points Us Toward Our Quantum Future
Scientists like to think that true measures of our understanding are our ability to predict something, and, in experimental physics, control something. This year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Serge Haroche and David Wineland for controlling the quantum world in ways that, not so long ago, were simply unthinkable. In this case,…
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Space Travel: Pioneer Anomaly Solved?
The 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating human expansion into other star systems, has some crucial hurdles to overcome. Basically, interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission, which isn’t possible yet. But a University of Missouri researcher thinks he has found the solution to a…
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Extending Einstein’s Theory Beyond Light Speed
University of Adelaide applied mathematicians have extended Einstein’s theory of special relativity to work beyond the speed of light. Einstein’s theory holds that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but Professor Jim Hill and Dr Barry Cox in the University’s School of Mathematical Sciences have developed new formulas that allow for travel…
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How Order Arises From the Random Motion of Particles in the Cosmos
One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth. The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases…
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Encounters With the God Particle
The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
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The Broken Beyond: How Space Turned Into an Office Park
Last summer the last Space Shuttle took its last space flight, but last week it took its last worldly one. It ended a generation’s era of space marvel, which turned out to take a very different path from that of the previous generation. During the 1950s and 1960s, space exploration was primarily a proxy for…
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Quasars: Mileposts Marking the Universe’s Expansion
Scientists can’t travel deep space the way Columbus sailed and charted the New World or Lewis and Clark mapped the west. But, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and two partnering institutions have found a possible way to map the spread and structure of the universe, guided by the light of quasars. The technique, combined…
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What Is the Smallest Thing in the Universe?
The answer to the enduring question of the smallest thing in the universe has evolved along with humanity. People once thought grains of sand were the building blocks of what we see around us. Then the atom was discovered, and it was thought indivisible, until it was split to reveal protons, neutrons and electrons inside….