Rosetta wakes up and phones home
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft has successfully woken up after almost three years in hibernation. Read more
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft has successfully woken up after almost three years in hibernation. Read more
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
The European Space Agency has confirmed that its next Large (L-class) mission will be an X-ray telescope investigating the “hot and energetic Universe”. Read more
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
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
Five theoretical physicists are in the running for the field’s most lucrative prize. Read more
A website that gave out more than $50,000 in cash prizes to visitors who suggested uses for patented research discoveries is changing tack, after a score of prize-winning ideas got nowhere. Read more
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
“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
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