Every winter, pine trees on the KEK campus in Tsukuba, Japan, get a treat. Komomaki (woven-straw blankets) are wrapped around the pines a few feet above the ground.
Mario Calvetti of the University of Florence has been named the new director of Frascati National Laboratories by Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), marking a return to the origins of his scientific career.
In honor of the World Year of Physics, symmetry featured an Albert Einstein teddy bear on the cover of the February issue. Since then, we have received a steady stream of phone calls and email.
The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the new CMS offices at Fermilab are separated only by the amount of time it takes light to travel between the two places.
I have heard conflicting reports as to who decided to call one of the most spectacular intellectual innovations of human history "the Standard Model," physicists' best construct for explaining the range and behavior of elementary particles that make up the universe as we know it.
Because particle physicists cannot directly see the objects they study, they rely on deduction and decay products to detect nature's tiny, ephemeral particles.