“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.
Scientists since the time of Sir Isaac Newton (and before) have built their work on the work of those who preceded them. Newton famously described this by saying, “If I have been able to see farther, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Standing outside in the dark and the cold on the east coast of Scotland, 500 people let out a communal gasp as a huge screen was illuminated on the side of the Torness nuclear power station.
Recently I discovered that one of the most beautiful expressions of Japanese craftsmanship is neither a vase in a Tokyo museum nor a carving in a Kyoto temple. Instead, it rests deep inside a mountain in the Japanese Alps.
Supersymmetry. Dark matter. Extra dimensions. Scientists have proposed the International Linear Collider (ILC), a next-generation project designed to smash together electrons and their antiparticles at a higher-than-ever energy, to learn more about these and other mysteries of the universe.
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.
Scientists working on the design of the proposed International Linear Collider have made some important decisions and agreed on the base-line configuration of the machine.
CERN, the laboratory, has its home outside Geneva, Switzerland, but CERN, the organization, is a much broader collaboration, involving all of Europe. The Council of CERN is seeking input on developing a long-term vision for European particle physics.
Drinking tea makes you more effective at work. Any type of liquid caffeine works well, but the effect is best when cookies are added. This isn't the result of the latest medical study–just an observation we have made while working in dozens of departments and laboratories around the world.
Women confront specific challenges working in the sciences. Often heated discussion of women’s work/home balance is in vogue in US newspaper and magazine editorial and feature pages.
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.
