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.
Ben Nachman and several friends climbed out on the roof of Westside High School in Omaha, Nebraska, hauling a tangle of wires and what resembled a car-top luggage carrier. The high school juniors weren't pulling some elaborate prank.
In June 1998, Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo presented strong evidence that neutrinos behave differently than predicted by the Standard Model of particles: The three known types of neutrinos apparently transform into each other, a phenomenon known as oscillation.
When the Homestake mine closed in 2003 after producing 42 million ounces of gold, it left a colorful gold rush history, tall steel headframes looming over a town of 3000 people, and an enormous hole in the ground: North America's largest and deepest underground mine.
Just before 7:30 on a bitter-cold morning in northern Minnesota, engineer Jim Beaty begins the last leg of his daily commute. He steps into a dark brown metal box with five coworkers. Someone slides the door closed.