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Curiouser and curiouser: a riddle at the ALICE detector

12/09/25

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.

11/01/07

DUSEL mine tour

In March 2007, members of a US National Science Foundation panel went on a whirlwind bus tour of potential sites for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Here’'s an account of that trip by Peter Fisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

11/01/07

Jets

A jet forms when a quark or gluon is produced in a high-energy particle collision.

11/01/07

Row, row, row...

Monica Dunford couldn’t stop swaying when she finally got out of the boat after 15 hours, 33 minutes, and 15 seconds of hard rowing. The physicist and her four teammates had just won the Tour du Leman, held Sept. 22.

11/01/07

Free for all

The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.

11/01/07

Scary Ben

It was 80 degrees under a cloudless sky in St. Charles, Illinois. Thunder boomed. Lightning flashed, striking a kite and shooting down the string to a bald scarecrow. Its giant eyes glowed. “What’s that?” asked a Girl Scout working on a nearby display.

11/01/07

On the trail of cosmic bullets

Do the most energetic particles in the universe come from supermassive black holes? New results from the Pierre Auger Observatory make that case.

11/01/07

Déjà blue

As Clark Cully watched the movie Déjà Vu with his parents, something about the movie’s time machine­—with its bright blue wedges of metal spewing a ring of wires—seemed eerily familiar.

11/01/07

The wrong stuff

Physicist Brian Cox has been watching science fiction movies since he was a small child. He always scoffed at the imprecise nature of the science in movies. But over the past year, he learned a lot about the balance between making a movie entertaining and making it scientifically correct.