LHC start-up announced
Robert Aymar, director general of CERN, gave his talk on the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider with veteran poise. The particle accelerator, he said, will reveal the origin of mass, the nature of dark...
Golden age in scientific computing
Visualizing data really has come a long way. It may have started with geniuses like Galileo mapping the movement sunspots as a series of sketches, but four centuries later it is all about supercomputi...
An inspiration to all
Paul Kagame is the last person you would expect to see at a science meeting. Eighteen years ago he returned to his native Rwanda after 30 years of exile. In 1994, as the genocide against his people cl...
Do the maths
The first AAAS meeting was held on 20 September 1848. So, not including this one, how many meetings do you think they’ve had so far? 160? Wrong. According to page one, paragraph six of the FAQ secti...
A resolvable contradiction
“Boston…is America’s science town,” began David Baltimore at a breakfast buffet this morning. He was speaking to a room full of journalists in the Hynes Convention Center with the intentio...
Science and technology from a global perspective
The 2008 meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is perhaps the biggest general science fair of the year. Not only is it a chance to catch up on all the latest break...
Been there…got the t-shirt
APS memorabilia: these will be worth a fortune on eBay someday. I actually didn’t buy an APS t-shirt — or a bumper sticker, slinky or travel mug — but I’m still glad I came to ...
A little bang at SLAC
What’s the best way to determine the structure of a molecule that cannot be integrated within a periodic lattice? Blow the heck out of it using x-ray pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source ...
The great pages debate
IOP Publishing’s reception was a big hit last night, judging by the fact that the buffet had to be replenished several times — you can work up a huge appetite running back and forth betwee...
Brrr…it's cold in there
Some of the most interesting condensed matter physics occurs at very low temperatures and physicists need accurate ways of knowing just how cold their samples are. Traditionally, this has meant spendi...
