On the Record

“We ran aground on a coral reef we were trying to protect.”

Greenpeace says sorry after its boat, Rainbow Warrior II, hits an ecologically fragile reef in the Philippines.

“I find it inconceivable that this paper is not well known.”

Cornell physicist Neil Ashcroft is surprised to discover an obscure 1922 paper on superconductivity — by Albert Einstein. A translation of the paper is now on the arXiv physics preprint server.

Sources: CNSNews.com, PhysicsWeb

Scorecard

Memorials

An art company based in Japan is offering a fresh twist for gardens of remembrance. It plans to make ‘living tombstones’ by generating trees whose every cell contains the DNA from a deceased loved one.

Child prodigies

An eight-year-old boy who dreams of building flying cars and joining the European particle-physics laboratory, CERN, has become the youngest pupil to enrol at a South Korean university.

Jet lag

Researchers in Chicago believe they have come up with a potent method for resetting travellers' body clocks. They say that a combination of bright light and melatonin has a much stronger effect than either element on its own.

Number Crunch

A survey by the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that 40% of its members have had ‘difficulties’ acquiring patented technologies to use in their work. Among those who had problems:

58% said that their work was delayed by the difficulties.

50% said that the problem forced them to change their research.

28% had to abandon their project altogether.

Source: http://sippi.aaas.org/survey