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01/28/19

Data scientists face off in LSST machine-learning competition

Data scientists trained computers to pick out useful information from LSST’s hi-res snapshots of the universe.

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A first-person view of physics history

10/15/24

Michael Riordan has spent decades ruminating on the history of physics, including events he participated in himself.

11/01/08

Sloan Survey shares starry snapshots

In the old days, astronomers who wanted to use a powerful telescope had to buy plane tickets and cross their fingers the weather would cooperate.

09/01/08

Contraterrene matter

As the winter of 1941 began, Jack Williamson sat in a small unpainted cabin he had built on his familys New Mexico ranch, pounding out a story on a secondhand Remington portable typewriter.

09/01/08

Weird new hazard: snoopy, itchy cows

In the control room in Argentina, the detector screen went blank. “We've been cowed again,” announced an exasperated scientist.

09/01/08

David Kirkby: It's a snail shell! It's a Koosh ball! It's physics!

Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm. But Koosh balls are another matter.

Illustration of neutrino symbols on a scale

09/01/08

Neutrino masses are extremely difficult to measure. While we know precisely how much an electron weighs, we have little information on the mass of its neutral partner, the electron neutrino. The same is true of the muon neutrino and tau neutrino.

09/01/08

Antimatter's science fiction debut

Fermilab radiation safety physicist William S. Higgins explains how the concept of antimatter first made its way into science fiction.

09/01/08

The LHC express

As passengers boarded the train in a Berlin suburb, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider greeted them: Imagine you are a proton and this train is the LHC tunnel. You will travel 37 km, slightly more than the 27 km it takes the protons to circle the LHC tunnel.

09/01/08

Ping-pong roast

At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.

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