Issues
Letters
Search and Discovery
Gravity Probe B concludes its 50-year quest
A conceptually simple experiment confirmed two predictions of general relativity, but not with the hoped-for precision.
Ultracold Bose gases deviate from the textbook picture
Interactions among identical bosons remove the upper bound on the number of particles in excited states.
Current-driven magnetic domain walls gather speed
The key, according to new experiments, is to house the walls in a sandwich of platinum, cobalt,and aluminum oxide.
Issues and Events
Scientists help make deserts into solar-energy hubs
Enthusiasm is high for collecting solar energy in the Middle East and North Africa, with some to be exported to Europe. But doing so requires overcoming political, social, legal, technical, and financial obstacles.
Shale-gas extraction faces growing public and regulatory challenges
Two federal agencies are scrutinizing the shale-gas industry and its use of “fracking,” but gas producers insist that state regulators provide sufficient environmental oversight.
Europe to invest billions in multinational science initiatives
Coordinating fragmented efforts in selected research areas is expected to provide a strong basis for future technological innovation, economic growth, and other benefits for society.
Developing-world academy of sciences has new leader
The mathematical physicist looks to increase the number of PhD scientists in economically challenged countries.
Supercomputing has a future in clean energy
As national laboratories tout their high-performance computing for energy applications, the path to more powerful computers may be blocked by prohibitive electricity requirements.
Articles
Adventures in scientific nuclear diplomacy
A former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory offers a first-person perspective on the important contributions scientists can make toward improving the safety and security of nuclear materials and reducing the global nuclear dangers in an evolving world.
Magnetic dynamos in the lab
There is as yet no predictive theory of planetary or astrophysical dynamos. But theorists, numerical modelers, and experimenters are on the case.
From near-field optics to optical antennas
Nanoscale probes that convert light into localized energy or vice versa form the basis for diffraction-unlimited imaging and intriguing light–matter interactions.
Books
Galaxy Formation and Evolution; How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form?
Aberration-Corrected Imaging in Transmission Electron Microscopy: An Introduction
New Products
Focus on software
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Obituaries
Donald Charles Backer
Georges Charpak
Albert Ghiorso
Jan Tauc
Quick Study
Probability, physics, and the coin toss
When you flip a coin to decide an issue, you assume that the coin will not land on its side and, perhaps less consciously, that the coin is flipped end over end. What happens if those assumptions are relaxed?