Fermi telescope captures a solar eclipseJuly 24, 2009 The Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope was launched to study
gamma rays, not sunshine.
Yet that's what it has done, most
recently last week, when one
of its instruments registered signals
from a solar eclipse. |
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A helium atom walks into a bar...July 21, 2009 Brian Malow is living proof that
a science comedian can actually
invoke laughs from his audience
instead of groans. While
researching a feature for the
current issue of symmetry on the
limited supply of helium on Earth
and how a helium shortage
would affect high-energy physics,
I came across a five-minute
talk Malow gave on the subject |
|
LHC updateJuly 20, 2009 In the latest issue of the CERN
Bulletin, the laboratory reports
that vacuum leaks have been
found in two "cold" sectors
of the Large Hadron Collider.
Repairing the leaks will require
the affected part of each sector
to be warmed to room temperature,
but will not affect the
vacuum in the beam pipe. The
repairs will push the collider's
restart date to mid-November. |
|
Dark matter may be brighter than expectedJuly 17, 2009 The Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope may find dark matter
in our galaxy more easily than
expected. Theoreticians have
demonstrated that small clumps
of dark matter in our galaxy
and others like it may be more
visible than previously thought. |
|
Feynman "Messenger" lectures now available onlineJuly 15, 2009 A set of seven talks by legendary,
Nobel-winning physicist
Richard Feynman is now available
online, free of charge and
through a much more versatile
application than YouTube. |
|
Physicists on a planeJuly 14, 2009 To some people, physicists are
even scarier than snakes on
a plane. A piece in yesterday's
New York Times with Michael
Tuts, experimental particle physicist
at Columbia University
and frequent traveler to CERN,
discusses how his seatmates
react to him being a physicist. |
|
Another cosmic-ray puzzle: Are iron nuclei bombarding Earth?July 13, 2009 For decades, scientists have
thought that the highest-energy
cosmic rays—those packing up
to a million trillion electronvolts—
were almost exclusively protons.
But data from the Pierre Auger
Observatory in Argentina may
tell a startlingly different story. |
|
Wood from NOνA site fuels renewable energy in MinnesotaJuly 10, 2009 Rather than wasting wood
cleared from the detector construction
site, a logging company
will sell it to two Minnesota
power plants. |
|
BaBar's hunt for an exotic Higgs particleJuly 7, 2009 The BaBar collaboration submitted
two papers to Physical
Review Letters last month, both
searching for hypothetical
light-mass Higgs bosons, the
particles suspected of giving
objects their mass. Neither found
evidence of a low-mass Higgs
in the BaBar data set. |
|
"Beyond our wildest dreams:" Fermi scope bags 16 gamma-ray-only pulsarsJuly 6, 2009 After only one year of operation,
the Fermi Gamma-ray Space
Telescope has already outperformed
researchers' best
expectations. In two papers,
researchers reported a new
class of pulsar and evidence that
helps explain how gamma-ray
emission occurs. |
|
World Science Festival: Time since EinsteinJuly 1, 2009 "Time, I think, is a little bit like love," began moderator John
Hockenberry. "It's accessible to all of us; it is intuitively experienced
by all of us in the same way; yet it retains its mystery at
whatever level you weigh in on it." |
|
Researchers find evidence for the origin of cosmic raysJune 30, 2009 An international team of
researchers has discovered
strong evidence that extremely
energetic cosmic rays are
born in supernova remnants. |
|
Fermilab's CDF observes Omega-sub-b baryonJune 29, 2009 The discovery of this "doubly
strange" particle, predicted by
the Standard Model, is significant
because it strengthens
physicists' confidence in their
understanding of how quarks
form matter–and because
it conflicts with a 2008 result
announced by CDF's sister
experiment, DZero. |
|
A Higgs boson without the messJune 26, 2009 Physicists at CERN's Large
Hadron Collider hope to discover
the Higgs boson amid the
froth of particles born from proton-
proton collisions. Results
from an experiment at Fermilab
show there may be a way to
cut through some of that froth. |
|
Steven Chu's energy challengeJune 26, 2009 Speaking at SLAC, Secretary of
Energy Steven Chu said, "For the
first time in history, science has
shown humans altering the destiny
of our planet in a meaningful
way. We have to try to enlist
some of the very best intellectual
horsepower to deal with this." |
|
Dancing with science, or, a little light musicJune 25, 2009 Before the official speeches
began at the National
Synchrotron Light Source II
start-of-construction celebration,
a lone dancer in fluorescent
green commanded the attention
of the audience with tribal
stomps and dramatic leaps, performing
a contemporary
dance piece titled "Time and
Space for Celebration." |
|
New ways to power particle acceleratorsJune 16, 2009 Yesterday, a team of SLAC
physicists and engineers put the
final touches on a revolutionary
new power source, the Marx
modulator, and threw the switch.
This milestone launches the
final step in proving the reliability
of a device poised to transform
the way particle accelerators
are powered. |
|
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You can find the full text of these and other items, updated weekdays, at www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/ |
Click here to download the pdf version of this article.
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Manga artist Takuya Uruno, whose work is featured in the gallery, designed this issue’s cover based on an edutainment Web series he created for KEK. It incorporates, from top, a superconducting radio-frequency cavity; string theory; and a Van de Graaff generator, whose static electricity fluffs up the hair of the girl in the middle.
Z Boson
Aug 2008
In May 1983, physicists working on the UA1 detector for the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator at CERN made the first definitive observations of the Z boson...
Theory
Sep 2007
A theory, in everyday language, differs little from a guess or a hunch. But in science we reserve the word for a well-developed idea based on experimental evidence...
