Archive

09/01/06

Making science "K'nex"tions

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center librarian Lesley Wolf needed a creative idea for the next library display. Ten-year-old Connor Reed had lots of free time this summer and an extensive set of K'nex, the flexible equivalent of Lego.

09/01/06

Brookhaven highlights unity

Flags, arts and crafts from different nations, and a warm welcome transformed the DOE Brookhaven Site Office's Second Annual Unity Day into a celebration of people and cultures working together.

09/01/06

Zoo events

When physicists at Fermilab smash particles together, most of what comes out of the collisions is well understood. But every once in awhile strange things appear in the data—incidents popularly known as zoo events.

09/01/06

Secret of the hidden ledger

When exploring the mysteries of the universe, don't neglect the floorboards. Last December at Fermilab, repairs to the ceiling over the kitchen in the Aspen East users' center, targeting a joist that had distorted the floor of the dorm room above, produced some startling debris.

09/01/06

X-ray lasers

X-ray lasers will be the next generation of light source.

09/01/06

Mikhail Shifman: Visualizing physics

The young people who will build our future appear to be largely unaware of how attractive and rewarding careers in science can be. We should not be surprised. In many high schools, physics is an elective subject lasting just a year, not nearly enough time to ignite curiosity in hungry minds.

09/01/06

Robert Straight: Toroids and plaids

Pick a number: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, 101, 103, 107, 109, 113 and so on and on and onand on. Get the picture?

09/01/06

Packing it in

Globe-traveling physicists put some of their best thinking into strategies for their bags–all carry-ons, of course.

09/01/06

The rise and fall of the pentaquark

Although initial results were encouraging, physicists searching for an exotic five-quark particle now think it probably doesn't exist. The debate over the pentaquark search shows how science moves forward.

09/01/06

New life for a linac

How the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is transforming the world's longest linear accelerator into a novel X-ray laser.

09/01/06

Lee Sawyer: Katrina aftermath challenges research institutions

The history of Louisiana is closely intertwined with tragedies. My father, who turns 90 this fall, vividly remembers the Great Flood of 1927. "You could take a boat from Monroe, Louisiana, to Jackson, Mississippi," he says, a trip of over 120 miles.

09/01/06

Physicists are people too

Physicists are dedicated to their work, but it often bleeds into their home and personal lives. Reading this issue of symmetry gives me a converse impression—just how human physicists are as they work.

08/01/06

First thoughts of the LHC

At the CERN Scientific Policy Committee meeting held on June 18-19, 1979, the construction of LEP, the Large Electron-Positron collider, was on the agenda.

Illustration of bullet on orange background

08/01/06

Higgs boson

The discovery of the Higgs boson provided insight into what gives elementary particles mass.

08/01/06

A long commute to summer school

This August, one hundred and fifty postdocs and advanced graduate students from around the world will gather on the Illinois prairie to enhance their understanding of particle colliders at the CERN-Fermilab Hadron Collider Physics Summer School.

08/01/06

Monitoring the LHC from across the ocean

When the LHC collider and its experiments are being switched on in 2007, scientists around the world will be eager to monitor the start-up in real time. But physicists won't have to be at the LHC site to monitor the hardware they built or to determine what tuning they need to do.