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Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

Despite our (usually modest) efforts to protect our personal information, thieves and hackers are constantly accessing our records. These data breaches have soared since 2005 . Although crooks still account for most invasions, many of the largest breaches are now made by "hacktivists"--individuals or groups who are angry about a company or organization's actions and expose its records as a way to protest or to strike back.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time used an apparatus that relies on the "noise" of jiggling electrons to make highly accurate measurements of the Boltzmann constant, an important value for many scientific calculations. The technique is simpler and more compact than other methods for measuring the constant and could advance international efforts to revamp the world’s scientific measurement system.