As early as this summer, rockets hidden in silos near this wind-swept town will give the nation its first operating defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles since the 1970's. Although the system is not a secret, it has been revived with so little fanfare that few Americans seem to realize it exists.
A panel of experts reviewed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and found that all of the objections that were used to defeat it in the Senate in 1999 were without merit.
The U.S. the federal government has sharply increased support for research into advanced sensors that could detect nuclear weapons but terrorism experts say that even the latest detection technologies ? and others that are the focus of research ? face forbidding odds. Ultimately, the experts said, all detectors are likely to meet a brick wall imposed by the laws of physics.
Radioactive materials in wide use in the United States could be turned into weapons of terror that would probably kill few people but would spread panic and produce severe economic damage, scientists told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Chandra X- Ray Observatory is advancing the field of cosmology but is also proving to be an unexpected boon for particle physicists, trying to understand dark matter.
Increasing computing power and advances in the development of algorithms, or computer codes representing subtle physics, have deepened scientists' understanding of the cosmic web and revealed its links to recent observational discoveries in the cosmos.
A defense official announced today that the Pentagon planned to renew research on a highly contentious element of the Strategic Defense Initiative called Brilliant Pebbles, a plan to base thousands of missile interceptors in space.
The directors of major physics laboratories in Europe, the United States and Japan gathered this week to make plans for a new particle accelerator they all agreed would be so large, powerful and expensive that it could be built only if they all cooperated on a scale without parallel in scientific history.
A group of physicists, historians and philosophers met recently to discuss how the Internet has brought trouble as well as opportunity to the scientific enterprise. For example, they argued that "instead of fostering many independent approaches to cracking each difficult problem, the Web, by offering scientists a place to post their new results immediately, can create a global bandwagon in which once-isolated scientists rush to become part of the latest trend."
Researchers say they have slowed light to a dead stop, stored it and then released it as if it were an ordinary material particle. The achievement is a landmark feat that, by reining in nature's swiftest and most ethereal form of energy for the first time, could help realize what are now theoretical concepts for vastly increasing the speed of computers and the security of communications.