Jean-Lou Chameau is leaving his post as president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at an unspecified date later this year to head the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. Read more
Over the weekend scientists learned more about the meteor that struck the Chelyabinsk region of Russia on 15 February. Ria Novosti is reporting that scientists from Urals State University in Ekaterinburg have made an expedition to Lake Chebarkul, where meteor fragments reportedly fell. Read more
This morning residents of the Chelyabinsk region of Russia saw an enormous meteor streak across the sky. Car dashboard cameras captured one or more objects falling to earth. Read more
This morning North Korea announced that it had conducted a third underground nuclear weapons test. The test was detected by US Geologic Survey seismic monitoring stations and those of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna, which reported “explosion-like characteristics”. The yield of the test is believed to be between roughly 3 and 10 kilotonnes, according to James Acton, a physicist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. Read more
Last autumn, the world’s most powerful laser missed a major milestone in its drive to produce thermonuclear fusion. Now the findings of an independent peer-review panel lay out in detail why achieving that goal is turning out to be so difficult. Read more
This morning, archaeologists at the University of Leicester announced that a body uncovered last September in a car park was in fact that of the famous king Richard III. The team revealed their find at a morning press conference, along with new photos of the body, which was found on the site of a long-buried medieval church. Read more
The experimental ITER reactor is supposed to show how to do nuclear fusion here on earth. So far, however, it’s been used by many scientists as an example of how not to do a major scientific project. The roughly €15 billion (US$ 19.9 billion) project has been parcelled into contracts, which in turn have been divided among ITER’s seven members: the European Union, Russia, Japan, South Korea, India, China and the United States. As we reported in autumn, this piecemeal strategy is threatening to delay ITER’s already delayed start date by years while the central organisation and member states parcel out designs and contracts. Read more
This morning, North Korea announced that it had successfully launched an Unha-3 rocket carrying a small satellite into orbit. Claims of success are nothing new for the regime, but this time, NORAD (the U.S.-Canadian defense radar network) confirmed that the nation had succeeded in placing a small object into orbit. Read more
Data visualization is all the rage these days, but there’s nothing quite like getting the story from points on a graph. In today’s issue of Science, Ken Buesseler of the Wood’s Whole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts provides plots of radioactivity in fish around the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that do just that (click image to enlarge). Read more
A report out this morning from the US National Academy of Sciences calls on the nation’s Missile Defense Agency to take a new tack on the age-old problem of stopping ballistic missiles before they fall on the homeland. … Read more
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The report produced by the investigators does not say so explicitly, probably out of fear of prejudicing future criminal/civil inquiries,… ... Read more
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