Issues
From the Editor
Readers’ Forum
Search and Discovery
Ancient clues help quantify modern methane
Natural geological emissions contributed little to the methane levels of the ancient atmosphere. The same could be true today.
Acoustic levitation widens the study of droplet jetting
To investigate the fission of charged droplets, a pair of chemists holds one stationary in electrified midair.
Ships cause their own stormy seas
Increased lightning frequency over maritime trade routes links pollution to the development of thunderclouds.
Issues and Events
Salaries for female physics faculty trail those for male colleagues
Gender pay gap is tangled with many aspects of physics culture.
Refracturing may not be all it’s cracked up to be
Restimulating oil and gas wells that have been fracked will be worthwhile in some cases, but not all.
Articles
The relentless pursuit of hypersonic flight
How much new science will it take to design a vehicle that can routinely fly at many times the speed of sound?
Preparing physics students for 21st-century careers
Whether they end up in industrial, governmental, business, or academic settings, college graduates need plenty of skills beyond an ability to solve problem sets.
In celebration of Ilya Lifshitz
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Ilya Mikhailovich Lifshitz, who helped found the field of fermiology and made important contributions to condensed-matter physics and biophysics.
Books
New Products
Obituaries
Karl-Heinz Rieder
Sheldon Schultz
Quick Study
Da Vinci’s observations of soaring birds
More than half a millennium ago, the great polymath Leonardo da Vinci sketched and described a maneuver that birds use to extract energy from a gradient in wind speed.
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