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12/01/07

The LHC by mail

Each year the European laboratory CERN welcomes tens of thousands of visitors. Now the lab can visit them back.

12/01/07

Across the ocean, yet close to home

Among the 10,000 people from around the world who are working on the Large Hadron Collider, 1000 hail from universities and national labs in the United States.

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

Jets

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

11/01/07

Row, row, row...

Monica Dunford couldn’t stop swaying when she finally got out of the boat after 15 hours, 33 minutes, and 15 seconds of hard rowing. The physicist and her four teammates had just won the Tour du Leman, held Sept. 22.

11/01/07

Scary Ben

It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.

11/01/07

Free for all

The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.

11/01/07

Déjà blue

As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine­—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.