August 2010

August 2010

• August 20, 2010
  signal to background: Alan Alda’s romance tips for researchers
  Alan Alda offers "wooing tips" for researchers.
• August 20, 2010
  signal to background: Family ties run deep
  Mark Hanhardt spent his childhood exploring caverns and watching his dad, who was a miner, come home from work covered in dust. Still, he had no interest in working underground. His dad, Jim, had instilled in him a love of science, and he planned instead to mine the mysteries of the stars and the universe.
• August 1, 2010
  letter: Explain it in a dentist’s chair
  I was having a routine dental cleaning the other day, and of course it’s an occupational hazard that people want you to explain what you do in words of one syllable or fewer.
• August 1, 2010
  signal to background: Back-of-the-banana physics
  Physicists have a reputation—self-made or otherwise—for discussing physics on any available surface.
• August 1, 2010
  signal to background: LHC detector project a big leap for Pakistan
  For most scientists, membership in a Large Hadron Collider experiment is a ticket to research at a frontier of particle physics. For Hafeez Hoorani, it also marked his country’s first step toward building a tradition of experimental particle physics research.
• August 1, 2010
  signal to background: Fan to Leon: Please sign my Higgs boson
  Who would you drive 10½ hours to see? The Grateful Dead? The Dalai Lama? What about an old, friendly guy who reads a lot and is really good at physics?
• August 1, 2010
  signal to background: Engineers flip for magnets
  Forget pocket protectors: Flippy magnets are the low-tech tools that some high-tech engineers won’t be caught without.
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  August 1, 2010
  explain it in 60 seconds: Redshift
  Redshift is the observed change in the color of light emitted by a star or other celestial object that is moving away from Earth. Light, like sound, travels in waves that are stretched or compressed when the source or the observer is in motion. Imagine a passing train blowing its horn: You hear a high-pitched sound as it approaches and a low-pitched sound as it recedes. The approaching sound waves are compressed and the receding sound waves are stretched, causing you to hear different frequencies.
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  August 1, 2010
  logbook: Strong focusing
  In the summer of 1952, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Cosmotron particle accelerator were preparing for a visit from scientists planning their own, more powerful, accelerator at a new European lab called CERN. Eager to impress their guests, the team began brainstorming ways to improve accelerator design.
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  August 1, 2010
  application: Cargo scanning
  More than two billion tons of cargo pass through ports and waterways annually in the United States. Many ports rely on gamma-ray scanners, based on radioactive isotopes such as cobalt-60, to screen cargo for nuclear materials or weapons. But an increasing number are turning to high-energy X-rays generated by particle accelerators to keep ports safe and prevent contraband from entering the country.
• August 1, 2010
  deconstruction: Isotope production
  Hundreds of thousands of patients around the world depend on medical imaging to reveal injuries, diagnose disease, or learn how a course of treatment such as chemotherapy is affecting their bodies. Physicians use the radioactive isotope technetium-99m in more than 80 percent of medical imaging procedures. But its global supply is in jeopardy.
• August 1, 2010
  gallery: Kate Nichols: Color by physics
  An artist''s search for a new way to create color could compel science to ask a few new questions of its own.
• August 1, 2010
  feature: The do-it-yourself cyclotron
  Amateur cyclotron builders are dedicated, tenacious, and obsessed. Another thing they have in common: The experience changes their lives.
• August 1, 2010
  feature: New imaging tools from the LHC
  Technology developed for the Large Hadron Collider is changing the way we see our bodies.
• August 1, 2010
  feature: Accelerators for America's Future
  A report from the field on the vital roles that accelerators play in energy and the environment, medicine, industry, national security and defense, and discovery science will inform strategic planning for accelerator science and technology by DOE''s Office of Science.
• August 1, 2010
  commentary: Dennis Kovar: Particle physics and America'’s future
  These are extraordinary times for particle physics, remarkable not only for the scientific discoveries that could be in store, but also for the very real opportunities to address critical issues confronting our nation.
• August 1, 2010
  editorial: Accelerators for the future good
  In an attempt to help explain the benefits of basic research, scientists, engineers, and industrialists met for the "Accelerators for America''s Future" workshop in October.