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11/01/05

Doctor Atomic: A manhattan project opera

Particle physics has been getting its due in the theater world with the recent plays Copenhagen and QED, which celebrate the lives and work of famous physicists. Now the field is being paid the highest musical and artistic compliment.

11/01/05

Robert Lang: Much more than paper hats

Artist Robert Lang has folded intricate paper sculptures from flat sheets that, in some cases, started out over nine feet long. He uses the same method many of us used to make cranes and party hats in elementary school–a series of precise folds. But Lang’s designs are far more complex.

11/01/05

Hot computers

Computing centers are hot--–literally. At least, they are in the absence of extensive cooling systems. With an increasing number of computers installed at scientific labs nationwide, the efficiency of those cooling systems is becoming much more important.

11/01/05

Meet the Grid

Today's cutting-edge scientific projects are larger, more complex, and more expensive than ever. Grid computing provides the resources that allow researchers to share knowledge, data, and computer processing power across boundaries.

11/01/05

Computing the quarks

A piece of steel may look cold and lifeless. But like any other piece of matter, it is bursting with activity deep inside. Electrons whiz around inside atoms, and a sea of never-resting quarks and gluons populates the nucleons that make up the atomic core.

10/01/05

Bottom quark

This memo by John Yoh, written on November 17, 1976, certainly caught the attention of the Columbia-Fermilab-Stony Brook collaboration (Fermilab experiment E288).

10/01/05

Asymmetric insight

Like climbers assessing a new route before making the ascent, physicists have been looking for footholds on a vertiginous new terrain. These footholds contain important information for trekking to TeV heights (the lofty trillion electron volts energy scales of future colliders).

10/01/05

Fermilab goes eBay

In need of a computer monitor? How about a forklift? Or maybe a sousaphone? If you are working for the US federal government or an approved agency, all this and more is available to your organization—for merely the cost of shipping a few boxes or a crate.