Have you ever sat in an open field at night, looked up at the vast number of stars and thought, “I bet an artificial brain would come in handy for making sense of all this”? You might if you were planning the best way for NASA to map the sky.
Just after 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 30, Fermilab accelerator pioneer Helen Edwards prepared to stop the circulation of subatomic particles in the Tevatron collider for the last time. She was a fitting choice; Edwards and her husband, Don, had led the Tevatron start-up nearly three decades earlier.
Maria Goeppert Mayer left an indelible stamp on the history of physics. Now the US Postal Service has honored the nuclear physicist with a stamp of her own.
Would you walk 10,000 steps for a piece of glass the size of a deck of cards? What if that piece of glass were part of an astrophysics experiment to warn people about potentially deadly asteroids zooming toward Earth and make a 3D map of the universe?
Nicole Ackerman thought she would always be a particle physicistuntil a newfound interest in biology drew her toward medical imaging. Her research on Cherenkov radiation, the blue glow from charged particles outracing light, could aid development of cancer treatments.
