Physicist Les Cottrell is the meteorologist of Internet weather. His project tests the strength of Internet connections around the worldand finds Africa lagging farther and farther behind.
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.
Jennifer Gimmell's coworkers didn't believe she competitively pumped iron. But as the evidence piled up—including a photo of her pulling a 23,000 pound truck—her fellow physicists had to concede: The strong force had nothing on Gimmell.
Hugh Montgomery has taken the helm of the Department of Energys Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia after almost 25 years at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. He is JLabs third director, replacing retiring Christoph Leemann.
Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm. But Koosh balls are another matter.