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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.

02/01/12

Science for all and all for science

Recently members of a group playing an online game called Foldit were able to solve a 15-year-old problem—determining the complex structure of an HIV protein—in just two weeks. This was made possible through citizen cyberscience.

02/01/12

The Tevatron's proud legacy

Just after 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 30, Fermilab accelerator pioneer Helen Edwards prepared to stop the circulation of subatomic particles in the Tevatron collider for the last time. She was a fitting choice; Edwards and her husband, Don, had led the Tevatron start-up nearly three decades earlier.

02/01/12

A brainy look at dark matter

Have you ever sat in an open field at night, looked up at the vast number of stars and thought, “I bet an artificial brain would come in handy for making sense of all this”? You might if you were planning the best way for NASA to map the sky.

02/01/12

Kate Findlay: Collider quilts

A 2008 newspaper article about the Large Hadron Collider inspired Kate Findlay to start a years-long quilting project.

02/01/12

A stamp of her own

Maria Goeppert Mayer left an indelible stamp on the history of physics. Now the US Postal Service has honored the nuclear physicist with a stamp of her own.

10/01/11

Science worth trudging for

Would you walk 10,000 steps for a piece of glass the size of a deck of cards? What if that piece of glass were part of an astrophysics experiment to warn people about potentially deadly asteroids zooming toward Earth and make a 3D map of the universe?

Illustration of pineapple (right) pineapple cut in half (left)

10/01/11

Symmetry

Symmetry is an expression of exact correspondence between things.

10/01/11

Cyclotron patent

On January 26, 1932, Ernest Lawrence applied for a patent on the cyclotron.

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