Physics News Archive: June 2003

Firehose-like jet discovered in action
Source: NASA/MSFC   Posted: 6/30/2003
An X-ray movie of the Vela pulsar, made from a series of observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, reveals a spectacularly erratic jet that varies in a way never seen before. The jet of high-energy particles whips about like an untended firehose at about half the speed of light.
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Uncharted Meteors
Source: NASA   Posted: 6/27/2003
The solar system is littered with uncharted clouds of space dust. They can trigger unexpected meteor showers on Earth and cause trouble for interplanetary spacecraft. Later tonight June 27th, our planet might run into one of these clouds--or not--during the annual June Bootid meteor shower.
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NASA's Odyssey Orbiter Watches a Frosty Mars
Source: NASA/JPL   Posted: 6/27/2003
NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft is revealing new details about the intriguing, dynamic character of the frozen layers now known to dominate the high northern latitudes of Mars. The implications have a bearing on science strategies for future missions in the search of habitats.
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Improving Control of Quantum Dots
Source: NIST   Posted: 6/25/2003
In the June 23 on-line issue of Applied Physics Letters, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report a way to measure accurately the amount of laser light needed to shift the electrons in a particular type of quantum dot between two discrete states.
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Nanowires Grown At Room Temperature
Source: UCBerkeley   Posted: 6/24/2003
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found an innovative way to grow silicon nanowires and carbon nanotubes directly on microstructures in a room temperature chamber, opening the doors to cheaper and faster commercialization of a myriad of nanotechnology-based devices.
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Powerful 'Conveyor Belts' Drive Sun's 11-year Cycle
Source: NASA/MSFC   Posted: 6/22/2003
NASA Marshall Center and university astronomers have found evidence the 11-year sunspot cycle is driven in part by a giant conveyor belt-like, circulating current within the Sun.
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Approaching Mars
Source: NASA   Posted: 6/19/2003
Everyone on Earth is hurtling toward Mars at 25,000 mph. Amateur astronomers report that the red planet is now so close, you can see its south polar cap through a backyard telescope. The view will only get better in the weeks ahead as Earth and Mars converge for a close encounter on August 27th.
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Imaging Lithium Atoms..
Source: LBL   Posted: 6/17/2003
For the first time researchers have used a transmission electron microscope -- the One Angstrom Microscope (OÅM) at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- to image lithium atoms.
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World's First Tunable 'Photon Copier' on a Chip
Source: UCSB   Posted: 6/17/2003
A research team at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) has for the first time incorporated on a single chip both a widely tunable laser and an all-optical wavelength converter, thereby creating an integrated photonic circuit for transcribing data from one color of light to another.
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European Experiment Hardware Reaches The ISS
Source: ESA   Posted: 6/17/2003
Preparations for the Spanish Soyuz mission on the International Space Station (ISS) in October took another step forward with the docking of an unmanned Progress M1-10 spacecraft with the International Space Station, on 11 June at 13:17 Central European Time.
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Science Quote

'The strength and weakness of physicists is that we believe in what we can measure. And if we can't measure it, then we say it probably doesn't exist. And that closes us off to an enormous amount of phenomena that we may not be able to measure because they only happened once. For example, the Big Bang. ... That's one reason why they scoffed at higher dimensions for so many years. Now we realize that there's no alternative... '

Michio Kaku
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