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10/01/09

Psyched for Manga!

I'm a Manga reader and a physics student. When relating my ideas to non-physics students, I had a hard time. Once I asked a cartoonist to draw a figure that would impersonate a particle, which I described to him.

10/01/09

Human ions collide for charity at BNL

The blue team rounded the bend first—sweaty, jovial, and headed toward the halfway point of the 2.4-mile path circling Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Suddenly, from the other direction, the yellow team emerged.

10/01/09

Sunscreen for an accelerator

A visitor wandering around SLAC last July would be forgiven for thinking the hot California sun had triggered a mirage. A parking lot at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource had transformed into a glistening lake.

10/01/09

Ski champion's wish comes true at CERN

She could take her pick of extreme adventures—rock climbing, skydiving, trekking through some exotic wilderness. The Swiss TV show Sportpanorama gave Dominique Gisin, winner of two International Ski Federation World Cup downhill victories in 2009, the chance to do anything she'd like.

10/01/09

Livingston plot

Physicists have been inventing new types of accelerators to propel charged particles to higher and higher energies for more than 80 years. Today, scientists estimate that more than 17,000 accelerators are in operation around the world—in industry, in hospitals, and at research institutions.

10/01/09

LabFest

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.

10/01/09

Crashing the size barrier

Like surfers on monster waves, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works.

10/01/09

Cleaner living through electrons

Studies show that blasts of electrons from a particle accelerator are an effective way to clean up dirty water, nasty sewage sludge, and polluted gases from smokestacks. Now researchers need to make the technology more compact and reliable.

10/01/09

Grad students follow the data

Worried about getting the experimental data they need to finish their PhDs, about two dozen graduate students have left the long-delayed Large Hadron Collider for experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron. Most of them say they won't be gone for long.

10/01/09

Robert W. Hamm: Industries thrive on particle beams

In a recent commentary ("Bosons and grocery bags", symmetry May 09), Fermilab Director Pier Oddone pointed out that most Americans don’t recognize accelerators, such as those used for medical therapy, as valuable by-products of particle physics research.

10/01/09

Accelerators: Where basic and applied sciences meet

Science is often divided into two parts: the basic, knowledge-for-its-own-sake part and the applied, turn-it-into-products part. This is a division convenient for structuring organizations and funding processes, but doesn’t reflect the real world.