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12/01/07

Q&A: James Gillies

Hollywood directors, time travelers, journalists, school kids—CERN’s press office sees them all.

12/01/07

Computers take on more than aliens

They started out scanning the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with SETI@ home. They’ve plotted chess moves, battled malaria, and folded proteins, all from their home computers. Now, volunteers are tackling particle physics with LHC@home.

12/01/07

Life among the physics tribes

Meeting in CERN’s Restaurant 1, anthropologist Arpita Roy of the University of California, Berkeley is quick to declare that she will not be having any more coffee today. She has begun drinking multiple cups per day as she meets with CERN physicists to learn about their work.

12/01/07

Spartan software

Every time Fermilab scientist Tom Schwarz starts up SpartyJet, he inwardly grimaces. The computer program works well. It does a fine job of finding and recording jets—sprays of subatomic particles that emerge from collisions involving protons.

11/01/07

Dark energy

In the fall of 1997, I was leading the calibration and analysis of data gathered by the High-z Supernova Search Team, one of two teams of scientists —the other was the Supernova Cosmology Project—trying to determine the fate of our universe: Will it expand forever, or will it halt and contract, r

11/01/07

GEQ***T

When Tom Nash bought a new Porsche 911 Carrera 4, he wanted to give it some personal flair. So he applied for a custom license plate: GEQ8PIT.

11/01/07

Author list

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) is one of two experiments that record the debris of powerful proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron particle collider to explore subatomic processes.

11/01/07

Jets

A jet forms when a quark or gluon is produced in a high-energy particle collision.