Magnetic heat engines
Magnetic heat engines have been known about since 1889, but the success of gas engines has largely prevented research into this technology. Magnetic engines work by converting heat directly into elect...
Amplification of matter waves
Bose-Einstein condensation itself was only observed for the first time in 1995. There has been intense interest in the process ever since because of the unique quantum behaviour displayed by matter in...
Missiles by day, planets at night
The $40 million Magdalena Ridge Observatory will use optical interferometry to merge light signals from three new telescopes into a single image. Researchers also hope to test new adaptive optics tech...
Newsbytes: Galileo and aliens
Galileo declassified The Vatican has finally made public its archives, after four and a half centuries of secrecy. Scholars will be able to access files relating to figures such as Galileo, up to the ...
Nuclear firms prepare for merger
The merger between Magnox Electric and British Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL) should be complete within a year, creating a new group with a combined turnover of £1.8 bn and almost 18 000 staff, inc...
Clinton backs US research
The good news is contained in the budget request for the fiscal year 1999 (FY99), which begins in October. The National Science Foundation will receive 10% more than this year, while science and techn...
Pathfinder leads the way to red planet
In The Crystal Egg, a short story written in 1897, HG Wells describes how a remarkable object in Mr Cave’s Curiosity Shop allows its owner to gaze at a real-time image from the surface of Mars w...
Critical issues at the original nuclear lab
First published November 1997 in Physics World As the sixth director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, John Browne faces broad challenges at a critical time in the laboratory’s history. Aft...
Fast spinning pulsar
Frank Marshall, Will Zhang and Eric Gotthelf from the Goddard Space Flight Center, and John Middleditch of Los Alamos National Laboratory found the star by studying data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray ...
Larger lenses
Despite the popularity of cheap plastic lenses, glass lenses are still essential for many applications. To make a glass lens, a gob of molten glass is dropped onto a catching tool, which compresses it...
