News & Comment

A trail of scarlet.

The discovery of a new class of high-temperature superconductors based on iron tests the limits of current theoretical and computational tools for the understanding of strongly correlated systems.

As we research the workings of the human brain, attempting to understand and even mimic its function, do we risk passing a point of no return?

The Bush administration has failed to engage with science and deliver on funding — that should change under the new President of the United States.

Politics can be hard to swallow.

Science once enjoyed a close and fruitful relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill — one that must now be rekindled, as a new president and Congress take office.

The 2008 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics”, and to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature”.

The Large Hadron Collider launched in a blaze of publicity. But, amid claims that the machine would destroy the Earth, is all publicity good publicity?

The perils of research.