APS Journals Highlights

The American Physical Society is pleased to announce a refresh of all PDFs contained in the scanned portion of our Physical Review Online Archive (PROLA). APS was one of the first publishers to put our entire backfile online, completing the scanning process in May 2001. In those early days, APS opted to put our content online quickly and in an inexpensive manner that would then allow us to take advantage of any future improvements in technology. We have now completed the next step by partnering with Aquaforest. Using their Autobahn DX conversion software, we have efficiently reprocessed our entire scanned archive of approximately 250,000 articles, further compressing them and adding searchable text. Researchers will find these enhanced PDFs faster to download and much more convenient to navigate and read. APS is committed to ensuring the long-term availability and usability of all of the information that we publish.

APS has expressed its deepest care and concern for colleagues in Japan who have been affected by the recent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear emergency. If you are having difficulties accessing our journals because of this situation, please contact us at help@aps.org and we will try to assist you.

NPR's Weekend Edition aired a story on a recent Letter, P. Beiersdorfer, D. Layne, and E. W. Magee, Viscoelastic Suppression of Gravity-Driven Counterflow Instability, Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 058301 (2011); see also the Viewpoint in Physics. The Letter shows how adding something as simple as cornstarch can in principle suppress the turbulent flow which caused the oil-well-plugging "top kill" procedure to fail. Significant hurdles would need to be overcome to make this work in practice.