Scientists see electron orbits
In copper oxide each of the copper atoms is expected to bond with two oxygen atoms. According to some theories however, the copper atoms can covalently bond with each other. Such bonds – in whic...
France joins UK synchrotron project
The UK synchrotron, once known as Diamond, is intended to replace the ageing second-generation SRS machine at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, although the location of the new machine has still t...
Physicists prove Van Gogh painting is not a forgery
Scientists at the research laboratory of the Museums of France in Paris compared the painting with nine of the 70 works accredited to Van Gogh during his time at Auvers. However, they were not allowed...
Synchrotron up for grabs
“The meeting was extraordinarily successful in helping to bring people together,” says Siegbert Rather, director for physical sciences at the United Nations Educa-tional, Scientific and Cu...
Array signals new era of ground-based astronomy
ALMA will gather highly red-shifted radiation from the furthest stars and galaxies, and will allow astronomers to observe cool dark objects such as brown dwarfs and interstellar dust clouds. The ALMA ...
Sharper image for polycrystalline materials
Polycrystalline materials contain lots of tiny crystals oriented randomly in space. Thomas Wessels, Christian Baerlocher and Lynne McCusker from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Züric...
Laser emits multi-wavelength light
Semiconductor lasers are usually monocromatic because the electrons stored in energy bands do not emit any photons unless they move out of the semiconductor’s conduction band. Federico Capasso a...
Magnetic resonance sniffs out bad wine
Recent developments in the use of high magnetic fields and pulsed NMR techniques have made it possible to probe the structure of organic compounds as complex as proteins. Imaging machines based on the...
Wet weather on Titan
Planetary physicists hope to use atmospheric data from Titan to provide clues to the behaviour of our own atmosphere. The difficulty with studying Earth’s atmosphere is that it is affected by ex...
