Table of Contents March 2006

Features

Fifty Years of Seeing Atoms
Beyond imaging atoms, clusters, and defects on a surface, today's microscopes can distinguish elements, monitor their diffusion and redistribution near the surface, and even create designer nanostructures and reactions — Tien T. Tsong

Two Hundred Years of Capillarity Research
Two centuries after seminal work by Pierre-Simon Laplace and Thomas Young, capillarity's modern applications arise in fields ranging from biology and oceanography to propulsion, materials science, and novel devices — Yves Pomeau and Emmanuel Villermaux

Macromolecular Phasing
Several techniques, well established and newly developed, allow crystallographers to reconstruct large molecular structures after recovering the phases that are lost inx-ray diffraction patterns — Qun Shen, Quan Hao, and Sol M. Gruner

Departments

Physics Update

Reference Frame

Time Too Good to Be True — Daniel Kleppner

Letters

Physics, Reductionism, and the Real World

Handling DNA Credit with Care

Scientists Don't Want New Careers in Desktop Publishing

Note on a Rosalind Franklin Note

Search & Discovery

Semiconductor Quantum Dots Take First Steps Toward Spin-Based Quantum Computation
Using nanosecond voltage pulses, researchers can entangle and rotate spin qubits in a double quantum dot—on demand.

Enormous Magnetic Reconnection Event Washes over Three Spacecraft Millions of Kilometers Apart
How large can reconnection events in plasmas get? Theory provides no easy answer. But the solar wind beyond Earth's cramped magnetosphere is a good place to look.

Microfluidic Chip Synthesizes Radiolabel for Positron Emission Tomography
For the past two decades, researchers have envisioned creating microfluidic circuits to control the mixing and reactions of chemicals that flow within 100-micron-wide channels on a single chip.

Issues & Events

Outlook for French science still uncertain, even as CNRS crisis subsides
Two years after their massive street protests, French researchers are worried that science remains underfunded and that the government is grabbing increasing control over the directions of research.

Bush budget boosts NSF, DOE, and NIST science for FY 2007
Although nearly all non-defense spending takes a big hit under Bush's proposed FY 2007 budget, basic research and science education get strong support.

Billionaire scientist rescues RHIC run
When the final federal science budget for fiscal year 2006 was passed by the US Congress in December, a cut of more than 8% in the nuclear physics budget at the Department of Energy had immediate and severe consequences for Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) director Praveen Chaudhari.

US visa processing speeds up
The US State Department is taking steps to simplify travel into the country and counter the complications of security measures that have been piled on since the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Physics employment in US reflects weakened economy
The production of physics and astronomy bachelors is rising, more bachelors are doing less-technical jobs, and more physics PhDs are doing postdocs.

Web Watch

APS March Meeting Has Broad Purview

Books

Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science,
S. Mitton (reviewed by R. Blandford)

Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life,
E. D. Schneider and D. Sagan (reviewed by C. Jarzynski)

The Grand Contraption: The World as Myth, Number and Chance,
D. Park (reviewed by H. Kragh)

A First Course in Computational Physics and Object-Oriented Programming with C++,
D. Yevick (reviewed by J. Tobochnik)

Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness,
J. S. Rigden (reviewed by A. Martínez)

New Books

New Products

Focus on Spectroscopy

We Hear That

APS Hands Out Awards and Prizes at March and April Meetings

Pinkerton Is ACA Vice President for 2006

AAPT Honors Two

Obituaries

Philip Morrison

Leo Brewer

Hubert Curien

Paul Leon Hartman

Job Opportunities