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Here’s the latest field report from the MAGIC climate research collaboration: Greetings from Honolulu! I had a wonderful trip over – mostly calm seas (we had a bit of rock and roll the last day out, but it wasn’t too bad), nice weather, some nice clouds to observe, and MAGIC data! In port in LA…
One of physics’ greatest tricks is polarization. Take magnets, for example, such as those commonly found on refrigerators holding up shopping lists and Christmas cards. These have the familiar north/south polarization that we can experience as attraction and repulsion. That magnetic orientation persists all the way down to the individual molecules, which actually align to…
The positive and sometimes unexpected impact of particle physics is well documented, from physicists inventing the World Wide Web to engineering the technology underlying life-saving magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices. But sometimes the raw power of huge experiments and scientific ambition draw the recognition of those seeking only the most extreme and impractical achievements on…
The Future of Subatomic Glue-Gazing
Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh on June 14, 2012 
RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab, found it first: a “perfect” liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons – a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) – produced by slamming heavy ions together at close to the speed of light. The fact that the QGP produced in these particle smashups was a liquid and not…
Mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, are the planet’s most powerful bare-knuckle boxers, armed with dactyl clubs that literally fly faster than a speeding .22 caliber bullet. Each strike boils the surrounding water and creates a tiny cavitation bubble, which then implodes with a sonic pop that can render targets unconscious. Consider that: if the strike itself doesn’t get you,…
With nanotechnology rapidly advancing, the sci-fi dream of a Star Trek replicator becomes increasingly less fantastic. But such radical technology would, in theory, require the kind of subatomic manipulation that far exceeds current capabilities. Scientists lack both the equipment and the fundamental knowledge of quantum mechanics (the Standard Model, for all its elegance, remains incomplete)…
Let’s start with a number, by chance a palindrome: 1441. Imagine taking that many photographs of a single object, a soccer ball, say – obsessively capturing it from every angle to expose all the details. Those 1441 images provide all the evidence needed to illustrate and understand the three dimensional structure of that soccer ball.…
Imagine looking in the mirror and finding your familiar face reflected back as you’ve always known it. But as you look more closely, as you precisely examine that mirror image, subtle distortions emerge. The glass itself remains flawless, but real and fundamental differences exist between you and the face that lives on the other side…
Replication Tango
Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh on March 15, 2012 
There are many complex steps to the dance of DNA replication. And scientists must learn to sway along in order to understand how both healthy and cancerous cells divide. Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have begun to learn how to follow the complex molecular choreography by which intricate cellular proteins recognize and bind to DNA…
Launching Weather Balloons in 45-mile-per-hour Winds
Posted by Karen McNulty Walsh on March 9, 2012 
This guest post was written by Ernie Lewis, an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven Lab, who is leading a year-long climate study aboard two Horizon Lines cargo ships, the Spirit and Reliance. He recently returned from a preliminary “cruise” from L.A. to Hawaii and back aimed at assessing conditions for deploying instruments aboard the ships…
