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04/01/08

A yen for dough like mom made

Many high-energy physics laboratories have athletic clubs, music clubs, or chess clubs, but a bread-tasting club? Only in Japan. And only at Koo Energy Ken, KEK, outside of Tsukuba.

04/01/08

Geek cruise

For most people, a Caribbean cruise is an opportunity for sun-splashed daydreaming, guiltless beach reading, and lackadaisical dips in warm, shimmering waters—in other words, complete mental repose.

02/01/08

W boson

In August 1982, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom, paid a private visit to the European laboratory CERN. On her arrival she told Director General Herwig Schopper that she wanted to be treated as a fellow scientist.

02/01/08

Caterpillar crawls to a high-energy rescue

Ryan Schultz and Kris Anderson had a problem: how to inspect a window in a pipe that carries a powerful particle beam, 40 feet below ground and 100 feet down a narrow tunnel.

02/01/08

SLAC's rocky past

Forty members of the Society for Sedimentary Geology drove down Loop Road, passed through the Sector 30 gate, and arrived on the north side of the klystron gallery.

02/01/08

Jennifer Ouellette: The Big Bang Theory

One of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!

02/01/08

Notes from the underworld

They had braved Parisian catacombs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavernous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncertainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting television crew.