Life, longevity, and a $6000 bet
The disagreement stems from a paper Gott published in Nature several years ago and recently discussed in the New Yorker magazine. In this paper Gott proposed a formula that suggests that by knowing ho...
Theorists tackle the Earth’s core
Dario Alfè, David Price and Mike Gillian of University College London used a Cray T3E supercomputer to calculate that the melting point of iron was 6700 Kelvin, plus or minus 600 Kelvin, at the p...
New hope for the travelling salesman
Kirkpatrick and co-workers found that the computer algorithms used to solve NP-complete problems can undergo sudden phase transitions as the various criteria used to search for a solution are varied. ...
Century old mystery solved
Invar has a face-centred cubic structure and is composed of about 65% iron and 35% nickel. In addition to its anomalously low thermal expansion, the alloy also has unusual elastic, thermal and magneti...
Physics highlights the randomness of fashion
In Fink and Mao’s method the space surrounding the tie is split into three sections: left, centre and right. To begin the wide end of the tie is passed either over or under the narrow part. The ...
Falling objects: new twists on an old problem
Andrew Belmonte of the University of Pittsburgh, and Hagai Eisenberg and Elisha Moses of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel dropped thin strips of plastic, brass and steel in various liquids ...
Computer heal thyself
Researchers are investigating new ways to make computer chips in an effort to increase processing speed. It is likely that these new methods, such as chemical fabrication and assembly, will produce la...
New ways to search the web
Search engines such as Hotbot and AltaVista record a list of pages with keywords in them, but cannot interpret how relevant the information is on the page. For example the word ‘quantum’ r...
Three steps to better biomedical images
The technique works on any turbid medium observed with light in the wavelength range 200-1000 nm, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Patent 5719398 describes how three simple stages ...
