Men and women wearing gaudy dresses, looking for customers under garish neon signs—this is a common sight in Kabuki-cho, Shinjuku, a famous entertainment and red-light district in Tokyo, Japan.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois has a challenge: how will it maintain its central role as a place where particle accelerators produce groundbreaking discoveries in physics?
On June 29, 2007, when Albrecht Wagner told an assembly of nearly 1800 people to go to lunch and return at 2 p.m. for a surprise, nobody could have expected what was coming.
Atomic element 94 was named “plutonium” after Pluto, the ninth planet from the Sun (now demoted to “minor planet” status.) By tradition, plutonium should have been assigned the symbol “Pl,” but co-discoverer Glenn Seaborg gave it the symbol “Pu” as
His photographs show scientists and experiments, large physics facilities and tiny devices, enthusiastic crowds of conference participants and lone researchers absorbed in thought.
Supercomputers can play chess, map DNA, and aid in the study of dark energy. But recently they were unleashed on a bold new frontier: optimizing the production of potato chips.
When Aaron Chou heard about an experiment in Italy that suggested the existence of an exotic particle as a candidate for dark matter, he was intrigued enough to go looking for it. His first stop: the Fermilab cafeteria.