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Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25

Sarah Charley

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together to solve the puzzle.

09/01/07

The art of the unseen

As technology evolves, posters are getting easier to produce and pass around. But it still takes skill and imagination to illustrate the abstract ideas of physics.

09/01/07

Amy Lee Segami: Painting with the flow

To artist and engineer Amy Lee Segami, water is no ordinary substance—it is her canvas. Using her knowledge of fluid mechanics, Segami paints on water in a contemporary version of the ancient Asian art form of Suminagashi.

09/01/07

From rivets to ribbits

An impromptu frog habitat vanished with final repairs to the roof of Fermilab's Meson Lab. Leaks—lots of leaks—have plagued the lab's 12 blue and orange concave arches since it opened 32 years ago.

09/01/07

Butterfly researchers come to Fermilab for rare species

Scientists usually search Fermilab for exotic particles, but two Alabama researchers recently sought another rarity—a butterfly called the Gray Comma.

09/01/07

HERAfest

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.

09/01/07

Particles in the sky

What is the universe made of? What are matter, energy, space, and time? How did we get here and where are we going? In particle physics, the classic place to look for answers is in giant accelerators where particles collide. But nature also provides a wealth of data.

08/01/07

Plutonium

Atomic element 94 was named “plutonium” after Pluto, the ninth planet from the Sun (now demoted to “minor planet” status.) By tradition, plutonium should have been assigned the symbol “Pl,” but co-discoverer Glenn Seaborg gave it the symbol “Pu” as

08/01/07

SCI-Arc

Asked to design a lab and office complex, students found inspiration in particle collisions, gushers of data, and the shifty habits of neutrinos.

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