On May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse forever altered our conception of gravity, rewrote the laws of physics and turned a 40-year-old, wild-haired scientist into a global celebrity.
With the Large Hadron Collider up and running, expectations are high: Shouldn't discoveries start pouring in? These things don't happen overnight. We trace the long, careful path from intriguing data to official discovery.
Scientists studying global warming hope to use dust buried in Antarctic ice formations to determine how fast the winds blew as many as 90,000 years ago.
You've got to understand that all this happened a long time ago, and I reckon that with the monitoring we have in place now we'd have picked up on the event much sooner. But even if it recurred today, would we have any idea what was causing it?
When a villain threatened Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon picked up a bright red phone to call Batman. During the Cold War, a Moscow-to-Washington "red phone" served as a hotline to prevent nuclear attacks. Now SLAC has its own red phone.
John Gilbey is a writer, photographer, educator, and project manager at Aberystwyth University in Wales. For the past two decades, his fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in the likes of Nature, New Scientist, and the Guardian.