Climate Models Do not Tell The Full Story (18/11/2009)
Climate models that predict heavy rainfall do not give the whole picture, according to the results of a study by NWO scientist Martin Ziegler. He examined climate changes that have taken place over the past 800,000 years, and discovered that the melting icebergs in the North Atlantic and changes in the El Niño Southern Oscillation have a great influence on the intensity of monsoon rains.
Will Europe Be Powered by the Sahara (09/11/2009)
Europe has long been interested in developing alternative energy sources. And, one of the more interesting places that some Europeans are looking for solar power is the Sahara. With the vast amounts of sun beating down on the Saharan desert, it seems an ideal place for solar panels. The Desertec Industrial Initiative, a consortium of 12 companies, including Siemens and Deutsche Bank, aims to make Saharan solar power for Europe a reality. But it would not exactly be easy.
Dark Matter And Dark Energy Make Up 95 Percent Of Universe, Detailed Measurements Reveal (04/11/2009)
A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy"s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and by Walter Gear, of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. These measurements of the cosmic microwave background -- a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe -- put limits on proposed alternatives to the standard model of cosmology and provide further support for the standard cosmological model, confirming that dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5%.
Artificial Black Hole Created in Chinese Lab (21/10/2009)
Cloaking technology used to create a region of space that allows microwaves in, but not out again.
If you have not heard of metamaterials and what they can do, where have you been? Most of the media coverage so far has focused on invisibility cloaks but that is just the start of the fun physicists can have with this stuff. Only a few weeks ago we were discussing how to recreate the big bang inside a metamaterial. And earlier this year, a group of physicists suggested that it ought to be possible to create a black hole using metamaterials. That is an interesting idea but a demonstration would be more exciting.
American is First Woman to Win Nobel Prize in Economics (13/10/2009)
Ostrom was also the fifth woman to win a Nobel award this year — a record for the prestigious honors.
STOCKHOLM — Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics on Monday, honored along with fellow American Oliver Williamson for analyzing economic governance — the rules by which people exercise authority in companies and economic systems.
NASA acquires data after spacecraft’ twin impacts into moon (10/10/2009)
NASA has successfully collected data after two spacecraft -- the Centaur rocket and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) -- impacted the moon"s south pole, the space agency said Friday.
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 (10/10/2009)
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama"s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Herta Müller takes 2009 Nobel prize for literature (09/10/2009)
German novelist Herta Müller, who received death threats in her native Romania after she refused to become an informant for the secret police during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime, has become only the 12th woman in 108 years to win the Nobel prize for literature. Praised by the Nobel judges for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose", Müller returns constantly to the oppression, dictatorship and exile of her own life in her novels, essays and poems.
The 2009 Nobel prize has been awarded to Herta Müller, for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose"
Three Americans win 2009 Nobel Prize for physics (09/10/2009)
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Charles K. Kao, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, all from the
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 (08/10/2009)
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
