Jon Cartwright investigates why just 20 per cent of pupils who take A-level physics are female, and what’s being done to address the issue

The girls at Redland Green School have little enthusiasm for atoms, forces, energy and stuff. Unlike the boys. “I like physics,” says James, 16, a GCSE student. “It explains everything. It’s the way the universe works. It’s pretty much the entirety of existence. And it’s cool.”

Scientists in the US and Canada have uncovered what could be the most detailed spectrum of an exoplanet to date. The spectrum reveals the presence of carbon monoxide and water, which suggest that the planet formed by core accretion.

Astronomers have detected some 3000 exoplanets since searches began in the late 1980s. Most of these have been spotted by looking for the dimming of a parent star as an exoplanet passes in front, or for a ‘wobble’ in a star caused by an exoplanet’s gravitional field. Both of these methods can reveal the orbits and masses of the exoplanets, and to some extent radii and composition. To get a proper look at an exoplanet’s atmospheric composition, however, a direct image is essential. […]

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Physicists in Canada and the US claim to be the first to make a direct measurement of the polarization quantum state of light – a feat that at first glance appears to defy Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The technique, which relies on a process known as weak measurement, could help in fundamental studies on quantum mechanics or in the development of quantum computing.

In quantum mechanics, it is normally considered impossible to know everything about a system at one time. Measure the position of a particle accurately, for instance, and the particle’s momentum will suddenly become very ill defined. Physicists call pairs of variables such as position and momentum “conjugate”: they are innately connected, such that the measurement of one essentially destroys information about the other. […]

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Realistic sea-ice data are crucial to the reliable predictions of climate models. That is the conclusion of an international group of scientists, who warn against the use of models that employ averaged or “climatological” sea-ice conditions.

It’s the sort of abstract puzzle that keeps a scientist awake at night: Can you predict how three objects will orbit each other in a repeating pattern? In the 300 years since this “three-body problem” was first recognized, just three families of solutions have been found. Now, two physicists have discovered 13 new families. It’s quite a feat in mathematical physics, and it could conceivably help astrophysicists understand new planetary systems.

The trove of new solutions has researchers jazzed. “I love these things,” says Robert Vanderbei a mathematician at Princeton University who was not involved in the work. He says he, in fact, spent all night thinking about the work. […]

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Advanced “cellulosic” biofuels that have a low carbon footprint will struggle in coming decades to compete economically with oil, a study by researchers in China and the US has revealed. The study, which takes into account the cost reduction that results from stimulated production, estimates that cellulosic biofuels will still be at least 40% more expensive than oil in two decades.

The earthquake that rocked Tohoku, Japan, in 2011 was so powerful that its rumble was ‘heard’ from space. Scientists in France and the Netherlands have found that sound waves from the quake reached as far as an orbiting satellite, 260 kilometres above ground.

Earthquakes make the ground resound like a giant subwoofer, generating seismic waves that travel through the Earth and, to a lesser extent, acoustic waves that travel through the air. […]

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Researchers in Europe have uncovered how forests dating back to the 16th century responded to extreme climate events such as droughts. The analysis, which reveals that an extreme event can affect the growth of trees for more than one year, should help scientists develop more accurate vegetation models.

The UK government will have to look elsewhere to store its mounting nuclear waste after plans were rejected to assess sites in Cumbria for a £12bn underground nuclear-waste repository. On 30 January seven of the 10 members of Cumbria County Council cabinet voted against a proposal to build an underground laboratory in the region that would have acted as a testbed for a full-scale storage. District councils in west Cumbria are now hoping that the veto – the second in 14 years – will be overruled by the government.

The UK has been generating nuclear waste since its first nuclear power station fired up in 1956. Since then the country has accumulated some 470 000 m3 of waste, which could remain dangerously radioactive for up to a million years. Most of the high- and intermediate-level waste is currently in temporary above-ground storage at the Sellafield nuclear- reprocessing site in west Cumbria. The UK government, however, would like to find a permanent place to store the waste because of fears that the storage at Sellafield is deteriorating. Indeed, last year the UK’s National Audit Office reported that Sellafield’s storage posed an “intolerable risk” to people and the environment. […]

For the rest of this article, please contact Jon Cartwright for a pdf.

Chemists in Japan and Italy have created a polymer-based material that has a crystalline structure. The material, which achieves its crystallinity with crosslinks between its polymer chains, is expected to have a high mechanical strength that will lend itself well to engineering applications.

The structure of fibrous materials has a big impact on their properties; the high-performance material Kevlar, for instance, owes its high tensile strength to aligned polymers that are anchored together with numerous hydrogen bonds. For this reason, chemists have been keen to hone the structure of polymers that do not naturally crystallise. […]

The rest of this article is available here.