Table of contents

Near-perfect copies of single photons have been made in the laboratory for the first time. Quantum systems cannot be cloned – or duplicated – perfectly, but the development of quantum cryptography and quantum computing relies on knowing exactly how well they can be copied. Antía Lamas-Linares and co-workers at Oxford University sent a photon into a crystal where it stimulated the emission of another photon with almost the same properties, thereby confirming previous theoretical predictions (A Lamas-Linares et al. 2002 Science at press).

The sharpest images ever obtained by optical means have been produced by researchers in Germany. Stefan Hell and Marcus Dyba of the Max Planck Institute for Bio-physical Chemistry in Göttingen used conventional optics to image clumps of bacteria just 33 nanometres across – equivalent to 1/23 of the wavelength of light used to illuminate them. This shows that "far-field" optical microscopes can operate well beyond the so-called diffraction limit (M Dyba and S Hell 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 163901).

Astronomers have discovered that two unusual neutron stars may actually be made of a more exotic form of matter. Observations of RX J1856 and 3C58, as the objects are known, reveal that they could be quark stars (arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0204151;0204159).

The EU's Sixth Framework Programme – which is due to spend some €17.5bn on research and technology development between 2003 and 2006 – is central to the vision of the European Research Area being championed by Philippe Busquin, the EU research commissioner. Busquin wants to bolster European science by creating a critical mass of researchers in particular fields and by improving the movement of researchers across the continent. While the Council of Ministers and European Parliament have still to approve the final version of the programme, the Commission is forging ahead with a widespread consultation exercise to assess what European researchers expect the revised scheme to deliver.

The Sunday edition of the New York Times is a weighty read at the best of times. But alert readers opening the paper on 17 March will have found a particularly dense dose of prose in a full-page advertisement. Headed in bold type "The Collapse of the Big Bang and the Gaseous Sun", the advert outlined the relationship between Kirchhoff's law, the temperature of the universe and the Big Bang. It was written by Pierre-Marie Robitaille, a professor of biophysics, chemical physics and radiology at Ohio State University.

A panel of leading academic scientists has been told by the US military that its independent technical advice is no longer needed. The 40-strong panel, known as Jason, has advised the Department of Defense (DOD) on weapons technology since 1958. The scientists, all of whom have security clearance, have fed their advice through the DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which carries out military R&D. "We have made a decision that we will no longer serve as the main sponsor for Jason," DARPA spokes-woman Jan Walker told Physics World.

The US panel that last year identified 11 fundamental questions about the nature of the universe has identified the six major experimental facilities that are needed to answer them.

An international team of physicists at the Ganil lab in Caen, France, has delivered the first radioactive-ion beam from the lab's SPIRAL facility to a new gamma-ray detector known as EXOGAM.

The National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics (IN2P3) – part of the French national research council (CNRS) – is to close the Vivitron van de Graaff electrostatic accelerator in Strasbourg by the end of 2003.

Solar cells have long been touted as a major source of clean energy, but until now have been too expensive for all but the most specialized applications. Several times more costly than fossil fuels, solar power accounts for just a fraction of 1% of the world's energy production. But this situation is set to change, with governments taking global warming more seriously and industry investing in new materials and processes with which to manufacture solar cells, otherwise known as photovoltaics.

A new accelerated approach to invention will be launched by the European Space Agency next month. The scheme, called Star Tiger, will bring together a small number of European scientists and engineers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, where they will be free from distractions and administrative burdens. They will be given four months to develop a low-cost terahertz imager capable of taking a colour picture of a human hand.

A shortage of science and engineering graduates with good transferable skills is holding back the British economy, according to a review carried out for the Treasury by Gareth Roberts, past president of the Institute of Physics. The review says that employers are finding it hard to recruit numerate graduates because fewer people are studying the physical sciences, maths and engineering. It says that this shortage could also affect the biosciences, which are "increasingly reliant on people who are highly numerate and have a background in the physical sciences".

Universities in the UK face a backlog of £3.2bn in maintenance expenses, according to a report commissioned by the government. The report, written by J M Consulting, says this money is needed to repair buildings, improve library and computer facilities, and update laboratory equipment. It says that the government must remove this backlog to avoid the need to continuously provide emergency infrastructure funding and to ensure the future health of British science.

Construction of the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury has been approved by NASA, following a successful review by an advisory panel.

Five new centres of research excellence have been set up in New Zealand, in the largest single boost to university research in the country's history.

Construction of a new research reactor for the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation was finally given the go ahead last month by the country's nuclear regulators – five years after the then Conservative government agreed to build it. The 20 MW deuterium-moderated reactor, which will cost over A$300m (about €110m), will become Australia's largest science facility when completed in 2005. It will have four times the flux of the 10 MW machine it will replace. The reactor will produce radioisotopes for medical use and will include eight instruments for neutron-scattering experiments.

When entering the office of a physics professor it is no surprise to find that space is at a premium, with books and research papers piled high on every available surface. In that respect, the office of Brian Josephson on the top floor of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge is no exception. But it would be wrong to conclude that Josephson is a typical physicist, and a quick glance at those books reveals why. With titles such as Consciousness Explained and Clairvoyant Reality, it is apparent that he is interested in subjects well beyond the scope of the average physicist.

The great physicist Paul Dirac did not have much time for poetry. "In science you want to say something nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand," he once said. "In poetry you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand." Dirac clearly preferred the world of theoretical physics to the equally abstract world of poetry, but Ricardo Mansilla, a mathematician at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has found a way to combine the two.

"If I was going to write a popular-science book, I wouldn't write it in German," says Heinz Oberhummer, a nuclear astrophysicist at the Technical University of Vienna. "I'd write it in English or choose an English-speaking co-author." Oberhummer, who has written for popular-science magazines in Germany, thinks that the German book market just is not big enough. "I'd also pick a British or American publisher. Britain in particular has a great track record in bringing science books to the wider market."

The language of life is written in a four-letter alphabet – A, C, G and T – that was jointly deciphered by physicists and biologists, but since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA almost 40 years ago, physicists and biologists have gone on to develop their own, quite distinct languages and vocabularies. However, the last few years have seen significant efforts to rekindle productive collaborations between the physics and biology communities, such as the workshop on "DNA and its interactions" organized by the Wellcome Trust – the biomedical research charity – and the Institute of Physics last month. (A report of this meeting will appear in next month's issue.)

Is it really only four years since the captain of the Brazilian football team graced the cover of Physics World? With the 2002 World Cup approaching – and with new data on how the drag force on the ball varies with velocity – we revisit the vexed question of the physics of the banana kick (see pages 41–44).

All university physicists will be well aware of the growing pressure to increase their research output – in other words, to work harder. Britain, however, is fortunate to also have many talented, dedicated and enthusiastic individuals who are keen to improve the quality of teaching and learning in universities and who are willing to devote a significant part of their career to that task. In fact, a recent survey carried out by the European Physical Society shows that the UK is one of Europe's most active centres for developmental work in university-physics teaching (www.nikh ef.nl/~ed/EDUCATION/epsedquest.html).

In his new book Meselson, Stahl, and the Replication of DNA, science historian Frederic Holmes recounts the story of what one researcher called "the most beautiful experiment in biology". The so-called Meselson–Stahl experiment, which was carried out in 1957, confirmed that DNA replicates in the way predicted by the then recently discovered double-helix structure. When Holmes asked five researchers why this particular experiment was so beautiful, their answers included simplicity, precision, cleanness and strategic importance.

I was profoundly disappointed to read Munawar Chaudhri's letter (April pp18–19) in which he described his failure to secure research funds from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). It contained several misrepresentations and erroneous assertions concerning EPSRC's procedures – in particular, the suggestion that EPSRC officials use "parameters unknown to [Chaudhri]" to rank applications. Our procedures are open and published – and also on our Web site (www.epsrc.ac.uk) – yet Chaudhri asserts that "the new chief executive...does not seem to be making the grant-application process clearer".

I was pleased to see your news story (March p12) draw attention to the problems surrounding funding for physics research from EPSRC. The key funding mechanism that supports the physics community – responsive mode – has been particularly hard-hit, with substantial sums of money having recently been top-sliced from EPSRC's budgets for other initiatives, such as e-science. As you reported, only eight proposals received support at the last prioritization-panel meeting, which is a representative figure for recent panels.

I enjoyed your special issue on women in physics (March pp 15–20 and pp 29–36). Whatever the existing barriers facing women, there are signs of change. I arrived one night at the Hilo Base Facility – home to the Gemini North telescope – to make observations. On duty that night we had an instrumentation engineer, a real-time programmer and our data-reduction astronomer. On the summit, meanwhile, I saw an astronomer and a night assistant.

Michael Rowan-Robinson asks whether Aristotle (384–322 BC) was the first physicist (January pp15–16). My answer would be: not exactly. The Pythagoreans, for example, had already worked out the physics of music, determining precise relationships between the harmonics. These relationships turned out to be simple integer ratios because music is an artificially quantized system. After all, the only allowed vibrations of a string with both ends fixed are those containing an integer number of wavelengths along the string. The formulae that the Pythagoreans derived stand to this day.

John Taylor's excellent review of the new book It Must Be Beautiful (March p47) examined the beauty of some of the great equations in modern science. But what exactly is this beauty? It can't be in the symbols themselves. Rather, I suspect, it is in the economic way that the combination of symbols can correlate a range of phenomena. Clearly, this form of beauty is different from that present in, say, the colours in the arch of a rainbow or the structure of a snowflake. Such beauty is accessible to all and requires no training.

They cause delays, cancellations and untold frustration to rail passengers in the UK every autumn. It's no wonder that leaves on the line have become something of a national joke, regarded by the British public as merely the latest excuse for poor railway services. The problem arises whenever leaves from trees bordering the track fall close to the rails, where they are swept up by the turbulence caused by passing trains before being crushed under the wheels of the carriages. The leaves are pounded into a hard, black, shiny Teflon-like substance that is difficult to remove, even with a sharp knife. Horse chestnuts and limes are the biggest culprits, with their leaves having the highest "squidge factor".

Lasers are routinely used to cool ions to sufficiently low temperatures for liquid-like behaviour to emerge. Now a team of physicists in the US has exploited the radiation pressure of focused laser beams to create wave patterns in a cloud of ions, which are similar to the wakes behind ships in deep water. Jason Kriesel and co-workers at NIST in Boulder and the University of California at San Diego produced the wakes in a rotating cloud containing some 45000 cold beryllium ions (J M Kriesel et al. 2002 Phys. Rev. Lett. 88 125003).

If we could see Jupiter's magnetic environment or magnetosphere in our sky, it would be many times the size of the Sun or full Moon – even though it is about five times further away from the Earth than the Sun. Indeed, apart from the solar wind – which reaches well beyond the realm of the planets – Jupiter's magnetosphere is the largest object in the solar system. Fly-bys past Jupiter by two Pioneer spacecraft, two Voyagers, Ulysses and Galileo have given much information about this truly giant planetary magnetosphere. But single-spacecraft missions are prone to spatial-temporal ambiguities: the situation is a bit like trying to measure the shape, motion and evolution of a terrestrial rain cloud using a moisture sensor on a single aircraft.

For the millions of football fans unable to travel to Japan for next month's World Cup final, watching the match on a home-cinema system will be the next best thing. By combining a large-screen television with a surround-sound processor and half a dozen loudspeakers, viewers will be able to recreate the sights and, in particular, the sounds of the Yokohama stadium near Tokyo in the comfort of their own homes. Surround sound allows armchair spectators to hear the linesman's whistle off to the side, the players' shouts from all over the pitch and the roar of the crowd as it echoes around the stadium.

For decades solid-state physicists and chemists have been controlling the electronic and magnetic properties of materials by swapping one type of atom for another. A classical example of this simple concept is phosphorous-doped silicon – by replacing a small number of host silicon atoms with phosphorous, we can change the material from an insulator into a metal. The difference in the valence of phosphorous and silicon provides the free electrons needed for metal-like behaviour.

A new hand-held electronic device that can detect traces of fermented milk promises to speed up production in Swedish dairies. Susanne Holmin of Linköping University has developed an "electronic tongue" that is sensitive to the electrochemically active compounds and charged ions found in complex liquids, including milk. A prototype of the instrument – which monitors the difference in catalytic activity between different metal electrodes – is currently installed in a dairy in southern Sweden.

WE NATURALLY think of our ears as receivers for sound, so it came as a major surprise when, in 1979, David Kemp of University College London found that ears can also emit sounds. A sensitive microphone placed close to the eardrum typically records a faint hum, but in many human subjects clear whistles can be picked up on top of the background buzz. In rare pathological cases, these sounds can be loud enough to be heard by passers-by!

IF WE look deep into the universe, we see stars and galaxies of all shapes and sizes. What we do not see, however, is that the universe is filled with particles called neutrinos. These particles – which have no charge and have little or no mass – were created less than one second after the Big Bang, and large numbers of these primordial low-energy neutrinos remain in the universe today because they interact very weakly with matter. Indeed, every cubic centimetre of space contains about 300 of these uncharged relics.

FOOTBALL is the world's most popular sport. This summer's World Cup will be watched on television by hundreds of millions of viewers, many of whom play the game themselves. Given this level of interest, it is remarkable how little attention has been paid to the scientific aspects of the game. Golf and cricket, for example, have been much better served. But for the physicist, the mechanics and aerodynamics of football pose a wide variety of interesting questions.

I first approached Revealing the Universe, which tells the story behind NASA's Chandra X-ray astronomy mission, with a certain amount of scepticism. What I expected was another book telling us how far ahead the US and its science programme are compared with the rest of the world. It quickly became apparent, however, that I had in my hands an in-depth account of the trials and tribulations that lie behind the success of any space-science project.

One of the most widely discussed and controversial scientific issues of the last few years has been the discovery that we live in a remarkably bio-friendly universe. This finding – which implies that certain features of the universe are constrained by the requirement that intelligent observers exist – is often dubbed the "anthropic principle".

The first four decades of the 20th century saw a drastic reorientation in the physical world picture. The change from Newtonian mechanics to relativity theories and quantum mechanics has often been seen as a revolution on a scale almost as great as the one that occured in the 16th century. The transition to modern physics has been described many times, both in its technical details and in its broader historical perspective.

The fiasco that surrounded the siting of the DIAMOND synchrotron two years ago confirmed the belief of many scientists that the UK needs to change the way it plans and constructs large central facilities. The project was mired in delay and many scientists were furious that the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford was chosen to host the machine, rather than the Daresbury Laboratory in the north-west of England (Physics World April 2000 p5). To discuss what can be done to improve the strategic planning of such large projects in the future, a star-studded panel of physicists gathered at Congress to take part in a "facilities forum".

The fiasco that surrounded the siting of the DIAMOND synchrotron two years ago confirmed the belief of many scientists that the UK needs to change the way it plans and constructs large central facilities. The project was mired in delay and many scientists were furious that the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford was chosen to host the machine, rather than the Daresbury Laboratory in the north-west of England (Physics World April 2000 p5). To discuss what can be done to improve the strategic planning of such large projects in the future, a star-studded panel of physicists gathered at Congress to take part in a "facilities forum".