MPs have warned that major cuts in research budgets and withdrawal from several major scientific facilities will endanger the UK’s international standing in astronomy and particle physics and its ability to inspire the next generation of scientists.
science
Fermi gamma-ray image updates ‘extreme Universe’ view
The Fermi space telescope has yielded the most detailed gamma ray map of the sky – representing the Universe’s most violent and extreme processes.
The telescope’s newest results, as well as the map, were described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome this week.
Measles
In the US it is a similar story, they are on course to have its worst outbreak of measles in more than a decade. Travellers are catching the highly contagious illness while on vacation, then bringing it back to the U.S.
What is going on here?
Supermassive black hole rises and shines
Science News reports that Astronomers watch as wake-up call rouses slumbering monster … It’s unclear whether it was a stellar meal or simply gas that woke the sleeping giant. But astronomers say the ongoing outburst recorded by a spacecraft since March 28 is the first time scientists have witnessed the sudden activation of a dormant … Read more
Revolutionary new paper computer shows flexible future for smartphones and tablets
Queens University press release reports …
“This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years,” says creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab,. “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”
Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine
An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.
WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.