Daniel Whitenack

The Register: British staff at Qinetiq, the company formed from an uneasy mixture of privatised UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) research facilities and profitable US war-tech companies, have voted to strike in protest at pay freezes and redundancies. Prospect, which... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

NPR: Students are counting down the days until the start of summer vacation, but is there a way to convince kids to do math over the break? Ira Flatow talks with Danica McKellar, Wonder Years actress turned math book author,... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Science: In geology textbooks, the fate of the oceanic crust seems straightforward. The ocean floor is created by upwelling of lighter magma at spreading ridges. The magma cools as it moves away from the ridge, forming a stiff layer or... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Los Angeles Times: A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads built more than 20-years-ago has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays. The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the W76,... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

New York Times: "In the debate over global warming, one thing is clear: as the planet gets warmer, sea levels will rise. But how much, where and how soon? Those questions are notoriously hard to answer. Scientists at the National... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Science News: A report given at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto, Canada last week suggests that scientists have discovered a way to measure the Earth's magnetic field from 1000 years ago. Geophysicist Annick Chauvin from the University of... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Nature: The ability to produce arbitrarily superposed quantum states is a prerequisite for creating a workable quantum computer. Such highly complex states can now be generated on demand in superconducting electronic circuitry. Related Link Synthesizing arbitrary quantum states in a... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

SPACE.com: "For the first time, astronomers have observed the phases of an extrasolar planet in visible light, as the world orbits around its star. The planet, CoRoT-1b, was the first planet discovered by the French CoRoT (Convection Rotation and Planetary... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays. More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Inside Science News: Search crews found debris fields Tuesday in the area where Air France flight 447 apparently crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Recovering parts of the aircraft on the seabed however, will be difficult. "The water is deep in... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Science: The fundamental rationale for the tenure system has been to promote the long-term development of new ideas and to challenge students' thinking says Dan Clawson from the University of Massachussetts Amherst, Amherst, MA. Proponents argued more than 60 years... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Nature News: ITER—a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source—will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped. Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

The Register: Hewlett Packard has confirmed that yesterday's announcement of UK job cuts will not just hit its manufacturing plant in Scotland, but also HP's research laboratories in Bristol. The firm will not detail exactly what is happening, but emails... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Associated Press: A mass extinction some 260 million years ago may have been caused by volcanic eruptions in what is now China, new research suggests. [Image credit: Re-evaluating vertical motion preceding the Emeishan continental flood basalt province, SW China] The... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Wired: The home page is nearly blank. At the center, just below a colorful logo, you'll find an empty data field. Type in a phrase, hit Return, and knowledge appears. No, it's not Google. It's Wolfram|Alpha, named after its creator,... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

Environmental News Network: A research team from the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center, and the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, both in Bergen, Norway, has studied observed anomalies in ocean climate, and identified the anomalies' progression with the circulation... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

The Guardian: Fifty years ago exactly the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave a lecture that has rung down the decades. Science and the humanities, claimed Snow, have become "two cultures," deeply divided and alienated. Literary intellectuals sneer at cultureless... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

AFP: Austria is pulling out of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Science Minister Johannes Hahn announced Thursday, citing budget concerns. Austrian physicist Daniel Grumiller published an open letter about the importance of CERN to Austrian science and called... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org

csmonitor.com: The Sun is a dynamic, chaotic, and poorly understood cauldron of thermonuclear forces, one that can spit out fierce bursts of radiation at any time. And when Earth lies in the path of that blast, the flare can play... Physics Today http://physicstoday.org