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An international team of researchers have found a way to determine the origin of colourless glass from the Roman period. Using isotopes of the rare element hafnium, they confirm that the prestigious 'Alexandrian' glass was indeed made in Egypt... The Roman glass industry was prolific, producing wares for drinking and dining, window panes and coloured glass 'stones' for wall mosaics. One of its outstanding achievements was the production of large quantities of a colourless and clear glass, which was particularly favoured for high-quality cut drinking vessels. The fourth-century Price Edict of the emperor Diocletian refers to colourless glass as 'Alexandrian',...

Using powerful computer simulations, researchers from Brown University have identified a material with a higher melting point than any known substance. The computations, described in the journal Physical Review B (Rapid Communications), showed that a material made with just the right amounts of hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have a melting point of more than 4,400 kelvins (7,460 degrees Fahrenheit). That's about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun, and 200 kelvins higher than the highest melting point ever recorded experimentally. The experimental record-holder is a substance made from the elements hafnium, tantalum, and carbon (Hf-Ta-C). But these...

After more than six decades of research, the first atom-powered airplane is cleared for takeoff. Although details of the project remain classified, a description of this remarkable aircraft has begun to emerge from technical conferences and declassified engineering studies. The plane will be both familiar and unique. Familiar in that it will resemble a Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, the bulbous-nosed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that the U.S. Air Force has used to track enemy movements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unique because its nuclear reactor is unlike any other. Rather than split heavy elements or fuse light atoms--as in fission and...

Photograph by Dave Lepori Bombshell: Pentagon hopes for next-generation atomic weapons were thrown a curve when one of its appointed physicists, SLAC's Bill Herrmannsfeldt, questioned the project's viability. Battle Over a Bomb Is a Pentagon push to exploit the explosive power of hafnium based on bad science? By Najeeb Hasan AN EXOTIC NEW potential technology that could fog the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons is being hotly debated by scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Britain's popular science magazine, New Scientist, speculated last August that the United States Department of Defense's plans to deploy the new bomb-making...

<p>The Pentagon's pursuit of a new kind of nonnuclear super-weapon has sparked a behind-the-scenes revolt among its elite scientific advisers, some of whom reject the scheme as pseudoscience.</p> <p>The military's goal is to develop a bomb that might be far more powerful than existing conventional weapons of the same size. Precisely targeted, such a weapon could take out targets -- such as underground caverns that conceal weapons of mass destruction -- without posing the severe political risks of using nuclear bombs.</p>