day in the life

Arturo Gomez has spent more than 40 years working with visiting astronomers at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

Former particle physicist John Mansour still creates analytic solutions—these days, for retail clients.

Physics training taught Brian Gerke how to figure out anything; now he’s applying his skills to energy-efficiency research, helping to set national standards.

Nicole Ackerman thought she would always be a particle physicist—until a newfound interest in biology drew her toward medical imaging. Her research on Cherenkov radiation, the blue glow from charged particles outracing light, could aid development of cancer treatments.

Science fest feeds hunger for knowledge—hammering nails with a banana to spark interest in science and technology

For birders, it all comes down to that moment. Focus your binoculars, steady your hands, and look, hard, until you find that glimpse of feathers, a spark of recognition. “Do you see it?”

Running the world''s most powerful X-ray laser requires a special intensity.

Just before 7:30 on a bitter-cold morning in northern Minnesota, engineer Jim Beaty begins the last leg of his daily commute. He steps into a dark brown metal box with five coworkers. Someone slides the door closed. In pitch dark, with its engine thundering, the elevator shudders as it travels a half mile below ground.

In August, robots, mummies, and giant jellyfish took over Chicago's Millennium Park. Fortunately, the invasion was peaceful— just part of the fun at the latest LabFest, a kind of pumped-up, hands-on outdoor science fair aimed to engage Chicagoans in the excitement of science.

When I assumed the position of director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU), my smart-mouthed friends joked that I became the Director of the Universe. They didn't imagine that I was going to meet somebody whose title would have made him a deity less than seven decades ago.

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.”

Some days Jerry Zimmerman calmly follows his typical morning routine and joins countless other suburbanites on the road to work. Then there are the other days. Those days Zimmerman takes on an alter-persona.

Really? Really, guys? Did we really have more than five thousand meetings last year? Some friends and I were discussing the volume of meetings within ATLAS, one of the two big detector experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, and I thought I might support this discussion with some statistics.

In March 2007, members of a US National Science Foundation panel went on a whirlwind bus tour of potential sites for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Here''s an account of that trip by Peter Fisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On June 29, 2007, when Albrecht Wagner told an assembly of nearly 1800 people to go to lunch and return at 2 p.m. for a surprise, nobody could have expected what was coming.

His photographs show scientists and experiments, large physics facilities and tiny devices, enthusiastic crowds of conference participants and lone researchers absorbed in thought. For almost half a century, the world has seen in his images the exciting moments and events of research into the most mysterious aspects of matter.

In August 2006, after almost a year of preparation, we packed up all our belongings to move from Batavia, Illinois, to Geneva, Switzerland. We were following our particle physics careers from Fermilab to CERN, the European particle physics lab.

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. They are both physicists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), pursuing studies of the processes involved in cataclysmic stellar explosions and exotic, highly unstable nuclei.