Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

Nobel meeting

Toward the end of June 1962, a virtual pantheon of modern physics descended on a tiny island just off the shores of Lake Constance, in Germany’s rolling Bavarian countryside.

Neutrino

Are we there yet?

With the Large Hadron Collider up and running, expectations are high: Shouldn't discoveries start pouring in? These things don't happen overnight. We trace the long, careful path from intriguing data to official discovery.

A field where jobs go begging

With a growing demand for particle accelerators in science, medicine, and industry, accelerator science is in desperate need of skilled specialists.

Ancient winds blow anew at IceCube

Scientists studying global warming hope to use dust buried in Antarctic ice formations to determine how fast the winds blew as many as 90,000 years ago.

Fiction: Catalyst

You've got to understand that all this happened a long time ago, and I reckon that with the monitoring we have in place now we'd have picked up on the event much sooner. But even if it recurred today, would we have any idea what was causing it?

Holy beam line! The red phone is ringing

When a villain threatened Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon picked up a bright red phone to call Batman. During the Cold War, a Moscow-to-Washington "red phone" served as a hotline to prevent nuclear attacks. Now SLAC has its own red phone.

John Gilbey tweaks the future

John Gilbey is a writer, photographer, educator, and project manager at Aberystwyth University in Wales. For the past two decades, his fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in the likes of Nature, New Scientist, and the Guardian.