According to classical models of economics, financial crises don't happen. People, firms and other economic "agents" act rationally, in their own self-interest and with profound insight. They would never be duped into investing in a market that was enormously inflated and about to crash. The result is a stable, self-correcting equilibrium. Prices too high? People stop investing. Too low? People start buying again.
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, Nature has learned.
CLAD in a dark suit and sunglasses, Derek Paravicini makes a beeline for the sound of my voice and links his arm into mine. "Hello, Celeste. Where have you come from today?" I reply and his response is immediate: "From Holborn?" He repeats the word several times, savouring each syllable. "Hol-born, Hol-born, Hooool-bbooorn. Where's Hoollll-booorn?" As our conversation continues, the substance of much of what I say doesn't seem to sink in, but the sounds themselves certainly do, with Paravicini lingering over and repeating particularly delightful syllables. "Meewww-zick. The pi-aan-o."
Space shuttle Atlantis today landed at Edwards Air Force Base at the end of its successful final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
The spacecraft touched down at 15:39 GMT. It was due to return Friday, but inclement weather forced NASA to twice postpone the homecoming. The first possible landing at Kennedy was also "waved off" earlier today, once again because of "poor weather conditions", and NASA elected to put Atlantis down at Edwards.
LIKE a giant pale blue eye, the Earth stares at the centre of our galaxy. Through the glare and the fog it is trying to catch a glimpse of an indistinct something 30,000 light years away. Over there, within the sparkling starscape of the galaxy's core... no, not those giant suns or those colliding gas clouds; not the gamma-ray glow of annihilating antimatter. No, right there in the very centre, inside that swirling nebula of doomed matter, could that be just a hint of a shadow?
The brain has long presented a special challenge to drug developers: tightly enclosed by the blood brain barrier, it remains locked to many therapies delivered orally or intravenously.
RESEARCHERS may have discovered a technique that will eventually lead to a way to vaccinate against the AIDS virus, by creating an artificial antibody carried into the body by a virus. This synthetic immune system molecule protected monkeys against an animal version of HIV called SIV, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine.
Dan Brown’s bestseller Angels & Demons hits the big screen today. For anyone who managed to miss the mega-bestseller, the plot hinges on a plot to blow up the Vatican using an antimatter bomb — a tiny device with the power of a nuclear warhead. They may sound good in a thriller, but are antimatter bombs more than just fiction?
A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak” from nanostructured silicon that conceals the presence of objects placed under it from optical detection. While the carpet itself can still be seen, the bulge of the object underneath it disappears from view. Shining a beam of light on the bulge shows a reflection identical to that of a beam reflected from a flat surface, meaning the object itself has essentially been rendered invisible.
The discovery of a 2- to 3-kilometre-wide asteroid in an orbit that goes backwards has set astronomers scratching their heads. It comes closer to Earth than any other object in a 'retrograde' orbit, and astronomers think they should have spotted it before.
The object, called 2009 HC82, was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona on the morning of 29 April.
