Archive by category | Physics & Mathematics

US$21 million awarded to delighted scientists in glitzy ceremony

In a ceremony hosted by actor Kevin Spacey and which featured a live performance from singer Lana Del Ray, six biologists and two physicists took home a combined US$21 million last night at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. It was the latest tranche of science mega-prizes sponsored by philanthropic billionaires.  Read more

Cutting-edge UK science facilities going unused

Scientific instruments that cost millions of pounds are standing idle in the UK because of a lack of money to run them, a new parliamentary report has revealed. There is a “damaging disconnect” between funding to build new facilities and the funding to actually run them, it concluded. This includes spending nearly £40 million on high performance computers, without budgeting for the electricity they use.  Read more

Updated: White House announces Energy Department nominees

President Barack Obama today nominated Franklin “Lynn” Orr, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, as under secretary for science at the Department of Energy. Orr’s nomination was accompanied by that of Marc Kastner, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, to head the department’s office of science.  Read more

US experiment to vote on dark matter

A US experiment is poised to resolve confusion over whether dark matter has already been detected. LUX (the Large Underground Xenon Experiment) at Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, announced today that it will release its first results on October 30.  Read more

Nobels 2013: Physics goes to Higgs and Englert

Nobels 2013: Physics goes to Higgs and Englert

“This year’s prize is about something very small that makes all the difference,” said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in making the announcement today that Peter Higgs and Francois Englert had won the physics Nobel. Normark also name-checked the ATLAS and CMS detectors at CERN in his announcement.  Read more

Researcher posts protected Science Curiosity papers on blog

An American scientist and noted blogger has posted copies of newly published papers about NASA’s Curiosity expedition on his personal website, potentially breaking copyright laws.  Read more