Topic: Atomic and Molecular Physics

Primer: The Big-Bang Machine

Unlocking the secrets of the universe doesn't come cheap. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has spent at least 10 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle ...READ»

• Now: May 2008
• Numerology: Book It
• Journal-ist: Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The tau neutrino

Near the end of the 1900s, scientists found the tau neutrino. It is the last of the fundamental building blocks of matter. My free article at helium.com: The tau neutrino and its place within the century of scienceREAD»

The tau neutrino

Near the end of the 1900s, scientists found the tau neutrino. It is the last of the fundamental building blocks of matter. My free article at helium.com: The tau neutrino and its place within the century of science audio ...READ»

Deus Ex Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is like the Moon--round, large and mystical. To doubting thinkers, it's like the Moon missions: expensive and unnecessary. If you're a Dan Brown fan, it's dangerous. But whatever you think of it, the LHC is ...READ»

The Energy of the Big Bang

The Force, the energy released at the moment of the Big Bang expanded out and created a volume of space at the same time it also began to transformed itself into a zillion different elementary particles, fermions and bosons if you ...READ»

Seven Curious Things Online this Week

The future is scary: hadron colliders, HD-video iPhones and nanotube lightbulbs are as bizarre as they are promising. Thankfully, this week on the Web shows us that not all that much has changed; we're still the same gawkers we were ...READ»

Super X Divertor Eats Nuclear Waste, Generates Clean Power

The Super X Divertor sounds like some fantasy invention from a 1950s Popular Mechanics. But it's a real device that helps enable two eco-friendly processes: Generating zero carbon-footprint power, and eating up dangerous nuclear waste ...READ»

Scientists Can Dance [video]

The 2009 meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will have an unusually creative side-act: scientists hitting the floor to dance. The aim is to express their research symbolically and the dance program is ...READ»