Physical Review Focus
Researchers used a magnetic material to create a difference in current-carrying properties between two perpendicular directions in a superconductor. They could easily change the directions with an external magnetic field, which could be useful in superconducting devices. More...

Physical Review Focus
Researchers have simulated the formation of complex shapes formed spontaneously by sheets of polymers in solution. The results provide a recipe for experimentalists that are studying these structures for drug delivery and nanofabrication. More...

MIT
Established in 2005, Scope showcases the work undertaken by the students in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing over the course of their year-long studies. First briought out as a quarterly newsletter, Scope transferred to the web in March 2008. The content in Scope, continually updated, displays the wide range of writing assignments within the program, from news articles and features to essays, book reviews, radio podcasts, and videocasts. More...

LiveScience.com
A sniff test of water vapor spewing from Saturn's moon Enceladus shows it is gushing with organic molecules, increasing the possibility of life existing somewhere in the Saturn system. More...

Physical Review Focus
A theoretical model shows that fission--nuclei breaking apart--may be an important part of the process by which supernovae produce the heaviest elements. More...

The Cosmic Log
Astronomers have been studying the atmospheric swirl at the Venusian south pole for more than three decades, and the latest crop of imagery from the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter documents quick changes in what appears to be the eye of a 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) hurricane. But they still haven't figured out the exact mechanism behind the vortex. More...

Physics Central
According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors on a CPU chip is expected to continue to double every 18 months. The less-well-known counterpart in computer hard drive design, Kryder's Law, predicts exponential growth in hard drive memory, which increased by a factor of a thousand between 1998 and 2005 and fueled the recent advances that brought us the MP3 player and HDTV-on-demand. The physicists whose fundamental research made these devices possible, Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2007 for their discovery of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), the large change in the resistance of a material produced by an external magnetic field. More...

Physical Review Focus
Researchers demonstrated an atom slowing and trapping scheme that may apply to elements that have been difficult or impossible to cool before. The atoms need only an unpaired electron, not a special set of internal states. More...

www.nsta.org
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) has announced the launch of a $43 million, five-year effort to create a national Center for Science Education (CSE). CSE initiatives will promote science literacy, produce the next generation of science education standards, and create a state-of-the-art facility that will allow science educators nationwide to engage in leadership and content-based learning opportunities. Senator John Glenn, former NASA astronaut and a lifelong champion of science education, will chair the $23 million external fundraising campaign. More...

Physical Review Focus
A century-old empirical law relates the number of times a material will survive a repeated stress to the size of the stress. A new model connects this law with steadily accumulating damage at the microscale. More...

LiveScience.com
One of the best tools astronomers have to glimpse the distant universe is a technology that nature invented. Cosmic magnifying glasses called gravitational lenses help scientists zoom in on far-away scenes they could never spot otherwise. In a recent survey of a section of the universe, researchers counted 67 new gravitational lenses, leading them to believe there are nearly half a million similar lenses in the rest of the universe. More...

Physics Central
An electron (bright green) has just scattered from a nucleus and created a pion (green-skinned particle). This pion's quarks are so tightly packed that they nearly cancel each other's color charge, allowing the pion to slip through the nucleus without interacting, an effect now seen at the lowest possible energies. More...

Physical Review Focus
Researchers have extracted electrons from atoms in a controlled way using sub-femtosecond light pulses. They also imaged the electrons' quantum states with unprecedented clarity. More...

The Cosmic Log
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers say they have spotted their first double Einstein ring – a bizarre optical phenomenon that shows how massive objects like galaxies can bend light rays, furnishing evidence for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. More...

Physical Review Focus
Why we sleep remains a mystery. Competing theories claim various "house-cleaning" brain activities occur during sleep, but they can't say why we need to power down to accomplish them. A study in the January Physical Review E suggests that a sleep-wake cycle, allowing the brain to focus on one task at a time, may be the most efficient way to operate. More...

LiveScience.com
AUSTIN, Texas — The most massive black hole in the universe tips the cosmic scales at 18 billion times more massive than the sun, astronomers suggest today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Even though researchers suggested black holes up to this mass might exist in quasars, this is the first direct confirmation of such a behemoth. More...

Yahoo News
Scientists believe that a quantum leap in computing power and the development of powerful new telescopes will soon unravel the "cosmic web," a theory by which the universe is bound by invisible threads of "dark matter." More...

Physics News Update
From electron tunneling to laser cooling, catch up on the top ten physics stories for 2007 in Physics News Update, published by the American Institute of Physics. Physics News Update is a digest of physics news items arising from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and magazines, and other news sources. Subscriptions are free as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and physicists. More...

MSNBC.com
Astronomers say they have discovered the youngest planet to date circling a sunlike star, a find that will be a boon to the field of planet-formation theory. The extrasolar planet is an estimated 8 million to 10 million years old, a mere toddler compared to Earth, which is 4.5 billion years old. Until now, the researchers say, no planet younger than 100 million years old has been detected circling a sunlike star. More...

MSNBC.com
The mysterious origins of cosmic rays that slam into the Earth's atmosphere could soon be revealed, thanks to a better ground-based sensor that costs less than balloons or satellites. Cosmic rays are thought to come from either the center of the galaxy or a nearby supernova, and knowing which is true will help astrophysicists paint a more accurate picture of the cosmos. More...

Knoxnews.com
A comet that has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest. The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies but can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper. More...

CosmicLog
Planet-hunters say they have detected a giant world that is nestled among four others in a planetary system 41 light-years from Earth. This newfound world is in the "Goldilocks zone" - a place that's not too hot, not too cold, but just right for the existence of liquid water and conceivably life. The fresh discovery, announced Nov. 6th during a NASA teleconference, focuses on a star and planetary system called 55 Cancri, in the constellation Cancer. More...

ScientificAmerican.com
You might not think that cosmologists could feel claustrophobic in a universe that is 46 billion light-years in radius and filled with sextillions of stars. But one of the emerging themes of 21st-century cosmology is that the known universe, the sum of all we can see, may just be a tiny region in the full extent of space. More...

Science News
Last year, physicists reported seeing tantalizing experimental traces of the axion, a hypothetical subatomic particle that's been mentioned as a possible constituent of cosmic dark matter. But the axion was showing up where theory said it shouldn't be. It now looks as if it wasn't there after all. More...

National Science Foundation
Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror. More...

Cosmic Log
After spending weeks in information-gathering mode, a Pentagon analyst says the idea of putting satellites in orbit to harvest solar power and beam it down to Earth has lots of merit - and a test of the concept could be set in motion by 2015. More...

Physics Central
Medical physics is not a well-known field, but it's an extremely important one, says medical physicist Albin Gonzalez. As chief medical physicist at the Firelands Cancer Center in Sandusky , Ohio , Gonzalez works with a team that is responsible for patient treatment and safety. More...

PopularScience.com
To coincide with their special Future of the Environment issue, PopularScience.com has constructed a Google Earth layer highlighting several geographic points of environmental interest around the world. More...

Nature.com
Fifty years ago this July Hugh Everett III (pictured at left) published his paper proposing a "relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics" - the idea subsequently described as the 'many worlds' or 'multiverse' interpretation. Its impact on science and culture continues. In celebration, a science fiction special edition of Nature on 5 July 2007 explores the symbiosis of science and sf, as exemplified by Everett's hypothesis, its birth, evolution, champions and opponents, in biology, physics, literature and beyond. More...

Cosmic Log
The World Wide Web was born in 1990 to manage the billions of bytes of data from experiments at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory. Now the same laboratory is gearing up for a new round of experiments that could generate more than a quadrillion bytes of data every month - data that will have to be processed and delivered to researchers around the world. Is there anything in sight that could outdo the Web? Say hello to the Grid. More...

CNN.com
They will be the earth's roundest spheres, crafted by Australian scientists as part of an international hunt to find a new global standard kilogram. Using a single crystal of silicon-28 grown by Russian and German scientists over three years, a team of Sydney scientists and engineers will grind and polish two silvery balls, each weighing precisely one kilogram, with imperfections of less than 35 millionths of a millimeter. More...

AIP Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science
A company in Purdue Research Park has created a new kind of search engine called 3D-Seek, thanks to a major advance in pattern recognition. The program lets users find hard-to-describe items—hinges, bolts, conveyor belts, or motors, for example—in an online catalog without ever needing to know the items' names, part numbers or keywords. Instead, all a user needs to do is draw a simple freehand sketch—a doodle. More...

American Institute of Physics
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has joined with twelve of the world's leading science and technology societies to create more direct access to their collective content. In June, the group will launch scitopia.org, a free federated vertical search portal that will enable users to explore the research most cited in scholarly work and patents in a single click. More...

AIP Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a new fingerprint visualization technique using X-rays that leaves prints intact and reveals chemical markers that could give investigators new clues for tracking criminals and missing persons. More...

by Zhenguing Qi, SPS Member, University of Rochester; & Lois H. Gresh
A Task Force commissioned by the American Physical Society (APS) in 2006 reports that there is an increasing divergence between the roles and needs of industrial physicists and the physicists in academia and government. According to the Chairman of the Task Force, Professor Charles Duke of the University of Rochester Physics Department, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, "We have a future in which industrial applications of physics and industrial physicists are increasingly important." More...

AIP Center for History of Physics
The American Institute of Physics, Center for History of Physics, has launched a new web exhibit that tells with unprecedented depth, accuracy, and excitement how scientists have explored the structure of the universe. "Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology" offers more than 35,000 words and 380 striking illustrations. Visitors can explore pages on topics ranging from ancient Greek philosophers to the peculiar giant telescopes of the eighteenth century to recent discoveries about "dark matter." The text was written and checked for accuracy by leading historians of science. More...

by Daniel Linford, SPS Member, University of Rochester; & Lois H. Gresh
A recent National Research Council (NRC) report called Network Science documents the profound impact of networks in our daily lives and describes how physicists can predict the behavior of these networks. According to the chairman of the NRC study, Professor Charles Duke of the University of Rochester Physics Department, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, "This is an emerging area of interest to physicists, especially those studying complex systems." More...