Signs of a Supersolid at the March APS meeting
from Scientific American
Look in that lab: it's a gas, it's a solid, it's a superfluid—it's SuperSolid! Well, maybe. The "it" in question is a collection of rubidium atoms cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero and the lab is physicist Dan Stamper-Kurn's at the University of California, Berkeley. Full Article

New Theory Blames Cosmic Rays for Helping CFCs Deplete Ozone
from CBC News
The hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer above Antarctica will be very big this year — and it will be big again in 2020 — contrary to previous predictions, argues a Canadian researcher. Full Article

Can Fractals Make Sense of the Quantum World?
from NewScientist
Quantum theory just seems too weird to believe. Particles can be in more than one place at a time. They don't exist until you measure them. Spookier still, they can even stay in touch when they are separated by great distances. Full Article

Texas Ed Board Approves Science Standards
from The Houston Chronicle
State education leaders forged a compromise on the teaching of evolution Friday, capping a week of impassioned debate that had scientists, teachers and textbook publishers from around the country focused on Texas. Full Article

Looking for Exotic Matter
from Ars Technica
One of the little-known aspects of physics' standard model is that there is a whole lot of it that remains untested. We have leptons, consisting of electrons, muons, and tauons, and we have hadrons, which are made up of combinations of quarks. Full Article

Graphene Works as a Frequency Multiplier
from Physics World
Electrical engineers at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) have created a carbon-based component which could significantly increase the speed of computers and communication devices, they say. Tomas Palacios and his team have used the “wonder material” graphene — sheets of carbon just one atom thick — to create a frequency multiplier that can double the amplitude of an electrical signal. Full Article

Seeing Beyond the Diffraction Limit in 3-D
from Scientific American
At a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) this past week, physical chemist W. E. Moerner of Stanford University presented a clever new trick for looking inside living cells. The technique allows views in three-dimensions and well beyond the so-called diffraction limit that ordinarily fuzzes up images at around half the wavelength of the light used. Moerner was this year's recipient of the APS's Irving Langmuir Prize in Physical Chemistry. Full Article

US Energy Secretary Announces $1.2 Billion in Stimulus Funds for National Labs
from The Chicago Tribune
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced Monday that $1.2 billion in federal stimulus money will be spent on science projects, saying that leadership in science is "vital to America's prosperity, energy security and global competitiveness." Full Article

Surprise Supernova: Massive Star Explodes Despite Being 'Too Immature' to Self-Destruct
from Daily Mail - UK
A star one million times brighter than our own sun has exploded, taking the science community completely by surprise. Physicists were stumped when the star, 200 million light years from Earth, erupted into a super-sized supernova in 2005. The spectacular event was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope. Full Article