ksnyder
Posts by this author
August 15, 2011
This guest post is by Brookhaven Lab physicist Steve Kettell, the Chief Scientist for the U.S. Daya Bay Neutrino Project in southern China. Kettell received his Ph.D. in 1990 from Yale University and is the leader of Brookhaven's Electronic Detector Group.
Steve Kettell
Neutrinos are downright…
July 7, 2011
At first glance, this video might look like it's playing in reverse. But don't worry, these stroboscopic images were patched together in the right order.
Courtesy of Labcyte, Inc.
The video shows a technique called acoustic drop ejection (ADE) - an idea based on sending ultrasonic waves near…
June 17, 2011
Hair breaks. It singes. It falls out. It might not be the strongest feature of living human bodies, but hair is one of the best-preserved tissues of dead ones, providing a record of diet, age, metabolism, and, sometimes, even the cause of death.
Ferdinand II*
With intense beams of x-rays at…
June 14, 2011
This guest post is written by Stephen R. Springston, an atmospheric chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry from Indiana University, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Utah before joining Brookhaven in 1986.
Stephen Springston…
June 9, 2011
Brookhaven will soon be home to the largest solar farm in the eastern United States. The Long Island Solar Farm, being constructed by BP Solar and the Long Island Power Authority on Brookhaven Lab's campus, will produce 32 megawatts of power when complete - enough to power about 4,500 homes.
The…
June 3, 2011
In news that may shake the cranberry juice industry to its core, new atomic-level "snapshots" reveal how bacteria such as E. coli produce and secrete sticky appendages called pili, which help the microbes attach to and infect human bladder cells.
These crystal structures -- produced at the…
May 25, 2011
Five years before becoming fully operational, Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) already is leading to discoveries -- of the historical kind.
Pieces of newspaper dug up at the NSLS-II construction site, which include a story about a boxing match scheduled for October 2,…
May 2, 2011
What did the universe look like 11 billion years ago? Something like this:
This image is part of the largest-ever 3-D map of the distant universe, which was released yesterday by scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) at the April meeting of the American Physical Society. Just…
March 23, 2011
Construction on Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) -- which will allow scientists to explore everything from fuel cell catalysts and soil samples to molecules vital for human life -- has passed the 50-percent completion mark.
The NSLS-II construction site
Work on the half…
February 8, 2011
How do scientists make glass stronger? Break it.
Brookhaven Lab physicists and engineers take this hands-on approach a step further. In order to strengthen the design of glass bulbs known as photomultiplier tubes, the researchers submerge the devices in 500,000 gallons of pressurized water, punch…
January 24, 2011
Earlier this month, BNL physicist Peter Takacs told you about his progress in resurrecting one of the world's first video games. And you wanted to know, "How do I do that?"
Based on feedback from that post, we've uploaded the original high-resolution schematics for Tennis for Two to the end of…
January 3, 2011
This guest post is written by Norman Holden, a Brookhaven scientist in the National Nuclear Data Center and a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). After receiving his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Catholic University of America, he spent a decade at the GE…
December 14, 2010
This guest post is written by Peter Takacs, a physicist in Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division. Takacs, who earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, joined Brookhaven in 1979.
Peter Takacs
More than a half-century ago, Brookhaven Lab nuclear physicist Willy Higinbotham sought to "…
November 8, 2010
This one-liner from the 1967 classic "The Graduate" might have made Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) cringe:
But 43 years later, it's obvious that Mr. McQuire was onto something. Today, it's hard to imagine life without plastic, from brushing your teeth in the morning to pouring yourself a glass…
October 15, 2010
This guest post is written by Brookhaven physicist Thomas Roser, Chair of the Collider-Accelerator Department. Roser, who earned his Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, worked at the University of Michigan before joining Brookhaven in 1991.
Thomas Roser
The chain of…
October 14, 2010
The steel framework that will house Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) is almost a complete, nearly half-mile ring after the last piece of structural steel was ceremonially signed yesterday afternoon.
Construction workers, Brookhaven employees, and elected officials signed…
September 29, 2010
This guest post is written by BNL theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan. After earning his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University in 1992, Venugopalan worked at several universities in the United States and at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, before joining Brookhaven in 1998. He is the…
September 14, 2010
This guest post is written by BNL cosmologist Anže Slosar. Slosar, who joined Brookhaven's physics department in 2009, received his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2003. He previously worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oxford University, and the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia…
August 2, 2010
Silk taffeta, flowing gowns, sheaths, and...a lab coat? It may sound like a fashion faux pas, but these were the makings of NYC-based designer Shin Choi's spring 2000 collection.
At $378, this lab coat should probably be saved for the most special occasions
That season's catalogue, which…
July 22, 2010
This is the first in an occassional series about Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or, as it's affectionately called, RHIC.
Lil John has a theme song for RHIC's latest experimental run.
Sorry, sorry! I couldn't resist. RHIC's actual ditty of the moment goes more like this. (Clean…
July 14, 2010
Despite their name, "high-temperature" superconductors require pretty darn cold conditions -- all far below freezing temperatures, some near absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) -- to operate without energy loss. As a result, they're not practical for everyday uses like more efficient power…
July 14, 2010
Thanks to the smart nano detectives out there who took a stab at solving yesterday's picture puzzle.
Mystery image #1, aka the "Nano Vortex," shows the different magnetization directions of an arrangement of nickel and nickel oxide. Captured by Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) scientist…
July 13, 2010
It's time for a little fun. Well, that is, if you consider marveling at modern-art-esque images of extremely small (i.e. on the order of billionths of a meter) materials fun. I do, so I'll assume I'm not alone here.
Take a gander at these two nano images produced at Brookhaven. What are they? Why…
July 8, 2010
Based on some of the (many) comments spurred by the appearance of PepsiCo on ScienceBlogs, we want to clarify Brookhaven's involvement on this site.
In April, Brookhaven was invited by ScienceBlogs editors to join the community as an institutional blogger, along with the Weizmann Institute of…
July 2, 2010
If you're American, chances are you'll be looking up this weekend for a spectacle of physics. But you also can look down from above -- way, way above -- to see the homes of some of the greatest physics experiments on Earth.
Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is probably one of the…
June 25, 2010
It was a time of fierce (but friendly) international competition, when physicists still built things with their own two hands. Dotted with barracks and trenches, Brookhaven was yet to fully transform its face from army camp to research institution.
In the early 1950s, the physics community was at…
June 23, 2010
A little more than one year ago, on the day of its groundbreaking ceremony, the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) construction site was nothing more than a whole lot of dirt. Today, it's...well, take a look for yourself.
The NSLS-II construction site on the day of the groundbreaking…
June 22, 2010
Where can scientists collide gold ions at close to the speed of light; take photos of some of the smallest materials known to humans; decipher the structure of proteins vital to everyday life; illuminate the brains of drug and food addicts; and test materials developed for fuel cells and other…