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Illustration of a scientist "listening" for background noise

Bringing background to the forefront

01/23/25

Chris Patrick

SNOLAB scientists meticulously measure the signals that interfere with sensitive physics experiments.

12/01/07

LHC cabling

It’s heavy, dusty, dirty work: Deep in the bowels of the LHC detectors, workers are rushing to connect a rat’s nest of cables.

An illustration depicting scale differences

12/01/07

The Terascale is an energy region named for the tera, or million million, electronvolts of energy needed to access it. Physicists are standing at its threshold, poised to enter this uncharted territory of the subatomic world.

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.

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 Projecttrying to determine the fate of our universe: Will it expand forever, or will it halt and contract, r

11/01/07

On the trail of cosmic bullets

Do the most energetic particles in the universe come from supermassive black holes? New results from the Pierre Auger Observatory make that case.

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.

11/01/07

The wrong stuff

Physicist Brian Cox has been watching science fiction movies since he was a small child. He always scoffed at the imprecise nature of the science in movies. But over the past year, he learned a lot about the balance between making a movie entertaining and making it scientifically correct.

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