Archive

09/03/08

Five years in five minutes: Watch the building of ATLAS

09/02/08

Film chronicles race between Fermilab and CERN

09/01/08

Contraterrene matter

As the winter of 1941 began, Jack Williamson sat in a small unpainted cabin he had built on his familys New Mexico ranch, pounding out a story on a secondhand Remington portable typewriter.

09/01/08

Introducing kids to science

I am a home-educating father of six living in Iowa, but I grew up in the Chicagoland area. As a young adult I was introduced to Fermilab through the late Dr. Sam Segler.

09/01/08

The symmetry challenge: Physics on a napkin

We've all heard the stories of great ideas first scribbled down in a bar on any convenient surface, often a cocktail napkin.

09/01/08

Weird new hazard: snoopy, itchy cows

In the control room in Argentina, the detector screen went blank. “We've been cowed again,” announced an exasperated scientist.

09/01/08

Powerlifting physicist pulls 11-ton truck

Jennifer Gimmell's coworkers didn't believe she competitively pumped iron. But as the evidence piled up—including a photo of her pulling a 23,000 pound truck—her fellow physicists had to concede: The strong force had nothing on Gimmell.

09/01/08

Chomp a cup for science

When you walk into a bar you expect to see whiskey bottles and beer taps, not stacks of tooth-imprinted foam cups.

09/01/08

Diving for zebras

Ben Czaplewski lifts a 30-pound helmet onto his head and lowers himself into a manhole. He disappears without a splash.

09/01/08

Ping-pong roast

At a recent symposium honoring former Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Director Jonathan Dorfan, dinner guests were treated to a course of the unexpected.

Illustration of neutrino symbols on a scale

09/01/08

Neutrino masses

Neutrino masses are extremely difficult to measure. While we know precisely how much an electron weighs, we have little information on the mass of its neutral partner, the electron neutrino. The same is true of the muon neutrino and tau neutrino.

09/01/08

Logbook: Contraterrene matter

See one of the first science fiction stories to feature the concept of antimatter.

09/01/08

Antimatter's science fiction debut

Fermilab radiation safety physicist William S. Higgins explains how the concept of antimatter first made its way into science fiction.

09/01/08

The LHC express

As passengers boarded the train in a Berlin suburb, researchers from the Large Hadron Collider greeted them: Imagine you are a proton and this train is the LHC tunnel. You will travel 37 km, slightly more than the 27 km it takes the protons to circle the LHC tunnel.

09/01/08

David Kirkby: It's a snail shell! It's a Koosh ball! It's physics!

Blackboards filled with mathematical equations and scientific machines as large as cathedrals can awe, and sometimes overwhelm. But Koosh balls are another matter.

09/01/08

JLab's new director

Hugh Montgomery has taken the helm of the Department of Energys Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia after almost 25 years at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. He is JLabs third director, replacing retiring Christoph Leemann.