Twenty-five years ago this week, NASA held its collective breath as seven astronauts on space shuttle Endeavour caught up with the Hubble Space Telescope 353 miles above Earth.
A Faraday Cup is (pick one) 1) a gadget named after the great experimentalist Michael Faraday, used to measure the current of a charged-particle beam, or 2) an award that recognizes the inventors of innovative instruments for particle accelerators.
Some days Jerry Zimmerman calmly follows his typical morning routine and joins countless other suburbanites on the road to work. Then there are the other days. Those days Zimmerman takes on an alter-persona.
When you hear the descending flurry of 16th notes in the trumpets, you know the gamma rays are coming. They speed toward the detector in the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope in chromatically harmonized notes.
As Reid Mumford pedals, sometimes he thinks about how to break away from the pack. Other times he thinks about how the smallest bits of the universe break apart in high-energy collisions.
US particle physics is pushing forward on three frontiers. Each has a unique approach to making discoveries, and all three are essential to answering key questions about the laws of nature and the cosmos.
Jason Steffen waited to board a plane in the Seattle airport. He waited to get his boarding pass scanned. Then he walked a few steps down the jet way, and waited some more. His frustration grew.
Inspired by heroes of Greek mythology, physicists are on a quest to find a cheaper, more efficient way to capture neutrinosone of the strangest and most fascinating particles in the universe.