Physics beyond the imaginable

Fermi's excellent adventure

Since its launch in June 2008, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has shed light on some of the brightest, most explosive events in the universe and opened tantalizing windows into dark matter and the nature of space-time.

May the fundamental forces be with you

A long time ago in a national laboratory far, far away… some physicists looked around their workplace and thought of dark forces. Not dark matter; not dark energy; but the ultimate force from the dark side: Darth Vader.

Antiproton discovery

When the Bevatron switched on at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the fall of 1954, it was the largest particle accelerator ever built, capable of producing energies upwards of six billion electronvolts.

Intensity Frontier

LabFest

In August, robots, mummies, and giant jellyfish took over Chicago's Millennium Park. Fortunately, the invasion was peaceful—just part of the fun at the latest LabFest, a kind of pumped-up, hands-on outdoor science fair aimed to engage Chicagoans in the excitement of science.

Ski champion's wish comes true at CERN

She could take her pick of extreme adventures—rock climbing, skydiving, trekking through some exotic wilderness. The Swiss TV show Sportpanorama gave Dominique Gisin, winner of two International Ski Federation World Cup downhill victories in 2009, the chance to do anything she'd like.

Grad students follow the data

Worried about getting the experimental data they need to finish their PhDs, about two dozen graduate students have left the long-delayed Large Hadron Collider for experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron. Most of them say they won't be gone for long.

Shrinking the cost of zapping cancer

Dejan Trbojevic's work on one of the world's largest particle accelerators helped him think small.