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05/01/07

When the new neighbor's a giant

Mike Herlihy is active in the village of North Aurora, near Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and west of Chicago. He’s been a village trustee for six years, belongs to the Lions Club and served on an advisory committee to evaluate a proposed freeway.

05/01/07

The great string debate

Inside, the auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, was packed and humming in anticipation. Outside, a man waved a sign at stragglers hurrying for the door: "Need One Ticket for String Theory Debate."

05/01/07

The search for dark energy

What is this stuff that fills the vacuum of space, accelerates the expansion of the universe, and accounts for 70 percent of everything? More than two dozen experiments aim to find out.

05/01/07

A public hunger for physics

Does the public care about particle physics? In this issue of symmetry we read about a few cases that hint the answer is yes.

Logbook of April 2007
04/01/07

PET scan

Scientists have sought to create better medical imaging techniques ever since Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1896 discovery that X-rays can reveal bones and other anatomical structures in a noninvasive way.

04/01/07

Slippery science

Why is ice slippery? Alain Haché has two kinds of first-hand knowledge. A veteran amateur hockey goalie, he learned to skate outdoors on frozen ponds.

04/01/07

Walkway to heaven

The Temple of Heaven, a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design in Beijing, symbolizes the relationship between Earth and heaven—human society and the universe—which stands at the heart of Chinese cosmology.

04/01/07

You wanted what?

Sometimes even the language of mathematics isn't universal. This realization came during March at the German lab DESY where a party was thrown by the Asian ECal team in thanks for the use of the DESY Calorimeter Group's test beam.

04/01/07

The hottest citation

The article at the top of the spires lists of the most-cited articles in high-energy physics is, as always, the Review of Particle Physics (RPP), a compendium of experimental data and reviews put out by the Particle Data Group.

04/01/07

Life service

Somebody who's racked up thousands of hours of community service has either been very bad or very good. SLAC carpenter Michael Hughes has been very, very good.

A simple illustration of a positron
04/01/07

Positron

A positron is the electron’s antimatter counterpart.

04/01/07

Charles Petit: Science writing's changing landscape

About 40 years ago I was a University of California, Berkeley astronomy student with a summer job at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. I listened from a neighboring room as a solar specialist read, in the Pasadena Star News, an account of his own research. He moaned. He cursed.

04/01/07

Ben Laposky: Visual music

A boxy cathode-ray oscilloscope, covered with buttons and knobs and meters and lights, looks like something you know you shouldn'’t touch.

04/01/07

Cultured couple

Working at the same place in similar fields, Michael S. Smith and Chang-Hong Yu enjoy a situation not too unusual among married couples. Not so ordinary is their line of work.

04/01/07

No-show neutrino

The first results from the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment, released in April, showed no hints of a fourth neutrino. But they contained a puzzling signal that could lead to new physics.