breaking

Last night, the beams were dumped for the final time from the PEP-II rings and the BaBar experiment took its last data. It was the end of nine years of operation in which the design specifications were more than tripled. SLAC and BaBar staff and collaborators commemorated the last day of running with a set of short speeches on the SLAC green, followed by ice cream for everybody.

Tens of thousands of visitors, hours-long lines, shuttle buses between major sights--a typical day at Disneyland, perhaps, but a very atypical day at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

During the week, the LIGO gravitational wave observatory was approved for the upgrade to Advanced LIGO that will give it the power to actually detect gravitational waves.

Hugh Montgomery, associate director for research at Fermilab, has just been announced as the new director of Jefferson Lab in Virginia, to succeed current director Christoph Leeman.

Richard Feynman's rambunctious spirit is in full cry in this video of him playing a drum and chanting an improvised riff on the subject of orange juice.

Over at Google Sightseeing, where the sights include the world's largest mud-brick building, migrating whales, and messages painted on rooftops, fans have posted satellite photos of many of the world's particle physics labs.

Scientific American's JR Minkel profiles the newest member of Congress, physicist and entrepreneur Bill Foster.

It's been a long winter at Fermilab. At times, it's called for a brief escape to.... Barsetshire. In a January editorial New York Times editor Verlyn Klinkenborg told Times readers of his pleasure in the novels of Angela Thirkell, chronicler of the fictional English county of Barsetshire originally created by Anthony Trollope.

For most folks, the Large Hadron Collider is the scene of the next great foray into the nature of the universe. For Hoist magazine, it's the land of a thousand cranes.