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02/01/08

Jennifer Ouellette: The Big Bang Theory

One of my favorite scenes in The Big Bang Theory involves the two main characters, Leonard and Sheldon, trying to move a large, flat box up two flights of stairs. Faced with no equipment and little upper-body strength, Leonard declares, “We are physicists!

02/01/08

Notes from the underworld

They had braved Parisian catacombs, gloomy dungeons, and shipwrecks. Yet as the elevator dropped 360 feet into a cavernous hall at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, uncertainty flickered across the faces of the globe-trotting television crew.

02/01/08

Dating a saint

Two towns in Italy lay claim to relics from St. Francis of Assisi–pieces of clothing and an embroidered cushion from his deathbed.

02/01/08

Biking the snow away

After seeing a documentary on Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Antarctic expedition, in which men ate shoe leather to survive in bone-chilling temperatures, David Peterson felt kind of silly about letting snow stop his bicycle ride to work.

02/01/08

Czech kimono challenge

Tokio Ohska had an opera to direct. As always, there were lighting, scenery, and music issues to contend with. But finding costumes to fit a cast of Europeans? That was a new challenge.

02/01/08

W boson

The W boson is a charged force-carrying particle that transmits the weak force.

02/01/08

Chateau Neuf du PEP

No one is able to claim credit for the ancient wooden sign that hangs on the porch of the old Positron Electron Project buildings at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.