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12/08/16

A syllabus in cosmic rays

What have scientists learned in five years of studying cosmic rays with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment?

03/01/05

Microchip

Custom designed microchips have become essential in processing signals from modern physics experiments that generate lots of data. This chip, the QIE9, designed by Fermilab engineers, is just one example of the many Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) used in such experiments.

03/01/05

Good-natured community relations

Working at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, you never know what projects may come your way. So when Helen Quinn, head of education outreach at SLAC, asked me to plant trees with a class of fourth graders, I said sure, it's not rocket science.

03/01/05

The growth of e-printing

Before the days of the World Wide Web, scientists would mail their colleagues preprints, hard copies of papers submitted to scientific journals. In 1991, particle physicists began posting these papers on the Web, calling them e-prints.

02/01/05

Special relativity

Einstein had promised but later refused to publish this 1912 expository treatise, his earliest known manuscript on special relativity. No original manuscripts survive for the articles of Einstein’s 1905 annus mirabilis.

02/01/05

Pixel art

Inspired by the pixel structure of far away objects in astronomical images, artist Tim Otto Roth uses live scientific data to create visions of science in action.

02/01/05

Event display

Finding new species of particles isn’t as easy as simply watching them fly out of a collider experiment.

02/01/05

Einstein iconography

I discovered the theory of relativity and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.