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The director general of CERN Robert Aymar believes that the US is not contributing enough towards the operating costs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is set to go online in 2007 and many countries are expected to benefit from the LHC in production to the number of physicists they have working on it.

Robert Laughlin's stint as president of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea would end in July 2006 after the Ministry of Science and Technology decided not to renew its two-year contract. Some of his achievements at KAIST are discussed such as a $20 million a year hike in the institute's budget and the way in which he managed to put the reform agenda in writing and get it into the public eye.

Atlas, which symmetrically implodes cylindrical targets was built at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and was used in 2001-02 before being moved to the Nevada Test Site. With delays due in part to lab shutdowns in 2004, it took until summer 2005 to bring the machine back on line and the expected lifetime of the machine is 1000 experiments, though it has been used for only a couple dozen.

The Isotope Separation and Acceleration (ISAC) facility at TRIUMF, Canada's national nuclear-and particle-physics laboratory in Vancouver is all set to produce rare isotopes in April 2006 after a Can$48 million upgrade. The ISAC-II upgrade revs radioactive isotopes to at least 4.5 MeV per nucleon, a three-fold increase. It would also be used for studies of nuclear structure, nuclear reactions and nuclear astrophysics.

Two universities in the Netherlands have distanced themselves from Dutch-born Nobel laureate Peter Debye due to his past actions in Nazi Germany. Utrecht University has stripped Debye's name from its Institute of Physics and Chemistry of Nanomaterials and Interfaces, and Maastricht University will not award an international prize for mid-career physicists and chemists unless the sponsoring foundation renames it.

Some American semiconductor companies have joined together to pursue long-term research with academic scientists and engineers in order to find a technology to succeed CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology. The Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) and the Institute for Nanoelectronics Discovery and Exploration (INDEX) are developing a new paradigm for faculty and students interacting with industrial scientists and to deal with the demise of basic research within industrial laboratories around the country.

International Committee for Weights and Measures reached a consensus that the measurement of mass is due for makeover, pending results of two experiments. Once a discrepancy between experiments disappears, the definitions of the kilogram, ampere, Kelvin and mole will be updated to keep pace with scientific measurement capabilities.

Thebe Medupe, a young African American researcher at the South African Astronomical Observatory talks about cultural astronomy and historical scientific activity in Africa. He believes that his work would attract other African Americans into science and technology.

Many French researchers are still worried that science remains underfunded and that the government is taking control over the directions of research, although the worst of the latest crisis at CNRS has subsided. Catherine Brechignac was appointed as president of CNRS in January 2006 and she is welcomed by France's science community.

The physics and astronomy employment in the US reflects a weakened economy, as the proportion of physics bachelors who took jobs has declined, from 50% in 2000 to 35% in 2003. The starting salaries for physics bachelors, the proportion of new physics PhDs who took postdocs and the proportions who are unemployed are discussed.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding six International Materials Institutes (IMIs) with the aim of stimulating a global network in materials science and training a new generation of internationally competitive materials scientists and engineers. The six institutes are similar in their amorphous structure and some of their activities, include funding international exchange of scientists to and from the US, organizing and supporting workshops and conferences and cultivating interpersonal networks.

Tight budgets and pricey instruments are spurring a trend among observatories to swap time. Wide-Field Multi-Object Spectrograph (WFMOS) is a collaboration of Gemini and Subaru observatories and Mauna Kea which will work through culture, technical, financial and administrative that could help in cutting the costs in observatories.

The International Young Physicist's Tournament is an annual competition, where the high-school students debate on various selected topics like the propagation of sound in foam and many other, which are published nearly an year before the competition. The tournament consists of a reporting team, an opposing team and a third team to review the first two and is very much likely to attract more number of participants in the forthcoming future.

A large number of physicists attended the World Conference on Physics and Sustainable Development and various ideas for the development of the industrialized countries in the areas of education, economy and health were put forward. The above mentioned goal can be achieved by providing teaching materials on the web and also by holding workshops to signify the importance of physics in the growth of a country, so that the people can acknowledge its necessity.

The NSF is conducting its first examination of spending across all wavelengths in ground-based astronomy and the senior review aims to cut spending by the $30 million a year on existing facilities to bolster present top priorities and start paying for future ones. The committee is expected to consider financial data and scientific justification from the optical-infrared, solar, and radio astronomy observations, also NSF schemes for cutting spending, various reviews and input from the astronomy community.

A comparison of the Texas Electronic Coalition for Physics (TECP) is compared with the other schools and is best known as distributed physics department. Susan is the chair of TECP who truly believes that distributed departments represent one of the best ways that small programs would survive in the future by pooling students.

Frankfurt Institute for Advanced studies (FIAS) in Frankfurt, Germany is moving away with European traditions in its structural, teaching and funding schemes, in a quest to become internationally competitive in the theoretical science. FIAS's funding comes mainly from private and corporate donors unlike European institutes and it has succeeded in raising about $19.3 million to be spread over five years.

Light pollution has devastating effects, which include the general public's diminished view of the night sky, animals from fireflies to frogs to migrating birds, and human health. A balancing act that proponents of dark skies approach with education, better light fixtures, and legislation includes preserving starlit nights in the face of ever-growing light use.

The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada suffered a setback when Department of Energy lawyers discovered a series of e-mails indicating some scientific data relating to the long-term environmental safety of the site were falsified. Department of Energy contractors discovered multiple e-mails written between May 1998 and March 2000 in which a US Geological Survey employee indicated that he had fabricated documentation of his work.

The German Electron Synchrotron laboratory (DESY) in Hamburg, RIKEN's Harima Institute in Japan and many others are pursuing projects to build X-ray free-electron lasers (XFEL). These accelerator labs would close a high-energy physics facility in the lead-up to build its XFEL.

The new facility near Paris would study the brain at previously untapped spatial and temporary scales. Neurons can be probed a million at a time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or by the dozen with electrical recordings.

Undergraduate physics majors assembled the Modular Neutron Array (MoNA) at Concordia College and nine other institutions that helps to determine the heaviest isotope that can be made for a give proton number. Spreading the construction of a detector across several institutions brings project visibility to participants.

An optical Society of America meeting in Rochester, New York brought together the historians of art and science to discuss about the optical aids of the early Renaissance painters. The university of Arizona physicist Charles Falco emphasizes whether the early Renaissance artists needed to use optical aids in their painting.

Timothy Koeth, a sophomore in physics built a 12-inch cyclotron. The stories behind every aspect of building the cyclotron are mentioned.

Discrepancy in the observed rates of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays is resolved by the new Telescope Array (TA) in Utah, which will combine fluorescence and scintillation detection methods used in earlier experiments. TA will have 576 scintillation detectors spaced at three-quarter-mile intervals, in addition to the fluorescence detectors, which are scheduled to be up and running next year.

The Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has blamed the July 7, 2004 disappearance of two classified computer disks on a few employees flouting the rules, and on July 15, ordered a complete stand-down or work stoppage at the lab. The occurrence of several such security lapses in the recent past is fueling speculation about the future management of the laboratory, which has been run by the University of California since its inception 61 years ago.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona has started a program called Hands-On Optics for the underrepresented middle-school children. The optic professionals from the Optical Society of America (OSA) and the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) have volunteered to help and inspire the students to perform well in maths and science.

The challenges faced by the ITER on selecting a site for the 5 billion dollars fusion reactor are described. Europe, China and Russia are insisting on Cadarache, in the south of France, while Japan, South Korea and U.S. are insisting on Rokkasho, in northern Japan.

Charles Alcock will lead the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), for a five-year term. Topping his list of new projects is the making of a gigantic telescope where the CfA will play a major role in its design, technology and finance.

Jim Truchard and his two employees founded National Instruments Corp (NI) in 1976 in Austin. Lab VIEW, a graphics based software program for acquiring, analyzing and displaying data is the flagship product of NI.

Grand Sasso National Laboratory has developed a project called Borexino, which will study neutrinos from beryllium-7 interactions in the Sun. The dispute among Gran Sasso and Gallium Neutrino Observatory (GNO) is explained.

The federal government has removed the restrictions on editing manuscripts under US trade embargoes.The Treasury Department has warned against collaborations between US scientists and their colleagues in sanctioned countries.

The addition of the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) in the University of North Carolina (UNC) is discussed. The various seminars and lectures presented on this topic are explained.

A review of the cold fusion by the Department of Energy (DOE) of Energy Research Advisory Board (ERAB) is presented. Some of the phenomenal results of various researches are also explained.

Scientific researchers across France are fighting for better jobs and payments for their research efforts. They have shown the government and the general public their increased concern for research.