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.
Many a college student has built a room around a sturdy coffee table made from a cast-off wooden cable spool. But when two University of Wisconsin graduate students went to the South Pole they found spools put to a different use: as chariot wheels
Ben Nachman and several friends climbed out on the roof of Westside High School in Omaha, Nebraska, hauling a tangle of wires and what resembled a car-top luggage carrier. The high school juniors weren't pulling some elaborate prank.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
