The contraption is just a dirt-dampness detector. Honest.

Marek Zreda and Darin Desilets of the University of Arizona approached airport security with a suitcase full of tubing, cables, electronic devices, and wires. The guard opened it. Lights started blinking.

Electronic personalities

Some claim that handwriting can reveal personality traits. Large, free-flowing loops reflect an easy-going nature; squiggly strokes, creativity.

A physicist's life: write a little code, mush a few Huskies

First the noses start twitching; then all five sets of ears perk up. Jen Adelman-McCarthy knows something tantalizing lies ahead.

Chuckling their way to a safer lab

There are many ways to deliver a clever play on words: deliberately with a nudge, coyly with a wink, or tossed nonchalantly into a conversation to trigger a delayed laugh—or a groan.

Cosmic rays spray art across a lawn

Bluish lights flash on a grassy field, like giant fireflies angling for mates—sometimes a single flash, sometimes a ripple of light moving fast, as if suitors have given chase. Then all 16 lights flash at once, and the whole field glows.

Biodegradable Café

At SLAC's Linear Café, a potato doesn't just go on your fork. It is your fork. The cafeteria began a green initiative about five months ago, abandoning traditional plastic spoons and plates in favor of biodegradable counterparts.

Brian Malow: Science yuks

If someone had told me when I was in high school that one day I would meet Stephen Hawking and have a meeting at NASA, I never could've guessed the trajectory I'd follow to get there. I would've assumed I had become a physicist.

Jorge Cham: Piled higher and deeper

Jorge Cham's popular comic strip about the lives of hapless grad students takes him to the Large Hadron Collider—and launches a series of comics that explains the science with remarkable clarity.

Cosmic weather gauges

Particle physics joins forces with other fields to look at two important factors shaping weather: temperatures high in the atmosphere and the dampness of the dirt beneath our feet.

Probing the heart of the atom

The familiar elements of the Periodic Table come in a number of forms, or isotopes—some found only fleetingly in the most violent events, such as exploding stars.

Result of the week

Behind every big breakthrough is a series of small steps that build on each other to enhance our understanding of the universe. At Fermilab’'s Tevatron Collider, physicists have been telling the unfolding story of their experiments in weekly installments for more than five years.

Jessica Reed: Custodians of the strong force

The increments of science

Particle physics rarely makes headline news, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t continually making progress. As in all sciences, research progresses through a series of incremental advances, with the occasional breakthrough that changes the way scientists think.