Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.
Fermilab might not have the world's longest fingernails or the world's oldest man, but, according to Guinness World Records 2007, the lab does have the most powerful beam of neutrinos.
Like many particle physicists, JoAnne Hewett can trace the course of her career through her scientific publications. But for a more colorful retrospective of her work, the SLAC theorist simply decorates her Christmas tree.
Security officers raise and lower 20 flags in front of Fermilab's Wilson Hall every day. Each flag represents a country that researchers come from to work at the lab. "The problem is that there are twenty flag poles," says Fermilab's Roy Rubinstein.
As work continues to complete the Large Hadron Collider in Europe and plans develop around the world for an International Linear Collider, one accelerator at the energy frontier is open for business right now. At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron collider is making discoveries.
Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.
The Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) isn't scheduled to open until 2008, but the Tokai campus facility is already the site of discovery—just not of the physics variety.
