UK seeks physicists for environmental research

Europe seeks to double research budget

'This increase is not in any way disproportionate in the context of the 3 per cent objective requested of all member states by 2010,' says research commissioner Philippe Busquin. To achieve it he stresses the necessity of increasing research investment by private companies to the equivalent of 2 per cent of GDP and national public research budget increases up to 1 per cent of GDP. 'We expect to...

European Union seeks support for top research council

support international research collaborations across Europe, were notorious for their abundance of red tape and complicated formalities. The current instalment, FP6, runs out in December 2006. For the successor, the European Commission has now presented a draft proposal containing some radical new thinking and promising 'significant simplification of its operations compared with its predecessor...

UK Environmental Prediction

Immunology for physicists

The immune system is a complex system of cells and molecules that can provide us with a basic defense against pathogenic organisms. Like the nervous system, the immune system performs pattern recognition tasks, learns, and retains a memory of the antigens that it has fought. The immune system contains more than 107 different clones of cells that communicate via cell-cell contact and the secreti...

SLE for Theoretical Physicists

This article provides an introduction to Schramm(stochastic)-Loewner evolution (SLE) and to its connection with conformal field theory, from the point of view of its application to two-dimensional critical behaviour. The emphasis is on the conceptual ideas rather than rigorous proofs. ∗Address for correspondence.