Science to ride gravitational waves

BBC NEWS: "Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: 'There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody,' says Jim Hough. The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other. But the real interest lies at his feet - with some shabby, corrugated metal sheeting. For a moment, it looks like an upturned pig trough until you realise it stretches for hundreds of metres. The sheeting hides a trench and, within it, the vacuumed tube of an experiment Hough believes will finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena - gravitational waves. The Glasgow University scientist has been chasing these 'ripples' in space-time for more than 30 years and feels certain he is now just a matter of months away from bagging his quarry."