“It’s not often you get introduced by a Nobel Prize winner,” said US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, former professor of chemical engineering at MIT and CEO of a Fortune 300 company.
Burl Skaggs lives in a two-story house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Each workday he has breakfast, kisses his wife Carol goodbye, and goes down to his extra-large garage.
High-energy physics labs worldwide are neighbors with numerous butterfly species–from the Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus, photo) found near CERN to the Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor) that shares the Bay Area with SLAC. But where do butterflies go in the winter?
Upon arriving for work at the laboratory of Masatoshi Koshiba at the University of Tokyo, Yoji Totsuka handed me a fax telling of a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, picked up by optical telescopes.
Unveiling the three-dimensional structure of proteins thrills scientists. While the potential for understanding the folding and function of enzymes is truly exciting by itself, exploring macromolecule structures also satisfies a more fundamental urge: to see the invisible.
The distinctive and amusing term "barn" originated with two Purdue University physicists working on the Manhattan Project in 1942—and it was classified information by the US government until after World War II.
Citation numbers and the Impact Factor of journals are often used to evaluate the quality and the importance of research. Both quantities have some shortcomings, and people using these indicators should know when and when not to use them.