Press Conference, Monday, 3 pm

WOODSTOCK 20
The 1987 March APS meeting was special because it featured a nearly-all-night session, dubbed the Woodstock of Physics, devoted to the cuprate superconductors discovered only a few months before. Here we commemorate the 20th anniversary of Woodstock and the 50th anniversary of the theory that explains low-temperature superconductivity. Paul Grant (IBM/EPRI/Stanford, one of many speakers at session B1) will describe what happened at the Woodstock session and the current status of high temperature superconducting (HTSC) applications. Georg Bednorz (IBM,), who won the physics Nobel Prize along with Alex Muller for their HTSC breakthrough, will describe the events of 1986/87. Paul Chu (Univ. Houston), the first to push HTSC materials into the liquid-nitrogen temperatures, will report on efforts to push critical temperatures still higher. Finally, Douglas Scalapino (UC Santa Barbara) will compare the highly successful BCS theory that applies to low-temperature superconductors to their cuprate counterparts; the effort to create such a theory has been described by some as the grandest goal of theoretical condensed matter physics. (Some pictures from the 1987 meeting will be available at the Physics News Graphics website)

Press Conference, Tuesday, March 6, 9:30 am

SMART ORGANISMS USE PHYSICS
Watching and analyze the behavior of living organisms with the tools of physics, researchers will present new discoveries showing that even very simple organisms carry out surprisingly sophisticated strategies for survival. Studying naturally produced "antifreeze proteins" that protect organisms from freezing in cold weather, Ido Braslavsky of Ohio University will show that the spruce budworm, a caterpillar-like insect found in North American forests
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Contact: James Riordon
riordon@aps.org
301-209-3238
American Physical Society
8-Mar-2007