Three-year-old Madeleine Rogers stands inside the spooky remains of a 275-pound pumpkin grown by her father, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center engineer Reggie Rogers.
Jodi Cooley works half a mile underground, in a mine that stopped operating 40 years ago. A rattling elevator takes her to work, 27 floors beneath the surface. The ride down the mineshaft is five minutes of complete darkness. A colony of bats inhabits the mine.
The big-bang theory of the early universe implies that the universe is immersed in a bath of microwave light, a cooled-down remnant of early high-temperature radiation, invisible to the naked eye.
A little after midnight, foreign voices and scents of dinner drift from the kitchen and down the halls of Dorm 1. Slavic dialogue stirs me from sleep and the aroma of cooked kielbasa sausage grabs my full attention.
Buried deep in the mountains of southern China, a new neutrino experiment would rely on a series of Chinese nuclear reactors and the brains of scientists from several countries.
The highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, Fermilab's Tevatron, boasts four miles of particle-accelerating circumference. But during thunderstorms it can become a bull's-eye for stray lightning bolts that demonstrate the intimidating power of nature.
At a special meeting in Lisbon on July 14, the CERN Council unanimously adopted a 17-point European Strategy for Particle Physics, based on the premise that "Europe should maintain and strengthen its central position in particle physics."
