Data and statistical analysis is a hard thing to explain to a public not accustomed to it and more used to pop culture imaginings of scientists just finding shit in sudden _eureka!_ moments. Based on a cross-section of interactions over the years, "s…
When the Tevatron opened in 1983 at Fermi National Laboratory, outside Chicago, it was the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, designed to smash protons and antiprotons together in order to see what makes up the universe.
Let's assume you've already watched our "brand new documentary":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/25/motherboard-tv-a-death-on-the-frontier--4 on Fermilab's Tevatron collider and America's steadily growing reticence to fund scientific research, part…
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the par…
Detecting and cross-checking (and cross-checking again) the existence of the Higgs boson is a big undertaking and an important one, so its attention from the press is understandable - laudable, even. But the problem with covering the Higgs boson sear…
Physicist Rob Roser is head of the Scientific Computing Division and formerly a spokesman for the CDF experiment at Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator, in Batavia, Illinois, an hour outside of Chicago. The Tevatron was switched off last September, leavi…
Hey, did you hear the big news? The Higgs boson has been discovered!!!! Oh wait. No it hasn't. Well, at least not yet. So please, for the love of theorized God particles, please refrain for the time being from shitting bricks and/or popping the bu…
CERN is set to announce the discovery of proof that the Higgs boson “almost certainly” exists, according to the AP. That’s a big freaking deal; it’s been more than 50 years since the God particle was first theorized, and it’s the last piece of the St…
It's safe to say that a whole lot more of the world knows what a neutrino is -- or at least that it exists -- than just a year ago. Thank IceCube, the somewhat high profile neutrino detection experiment in Antarctica, and, most especially, the highly…
The world’s top physicists spent the past week in Grenoble getting theoretically and experimentally drunk on all things sub-atomic at the 2011 "Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics":http://www.eps.org/conferences/europhysics_conferences/hep-…
_It looks like particle colliders are finding more and creating apocalyptic black holes less_ h3. One: "God Particle, Dark Matter, Secrets Of the Universe: CERN To Hold Major Press Conference Monday":http://www.newsbad.com/story/god-particle-dark-…
_It's good to see that Fermilab is still getting some_ h3. ONE: FCC's report on how to improve local journalism in the age of the Webs ("FCC":http://www.fcc.gov/info-needs-communities) h3. Zero: A cheating computer ("Extreme Tech":http://www.ex…
The story of Fermilab is a story about keeping calm and collected on the vanguard of knowledge. Yeah, Robert Wilson, the lab’s founding director, was an impassioned, divisive figure, wrangling with the public over where to build the National Accelera…
It's a bump, a weird bump in collision data at Fermilab's "soon-to-be shuttered":http://motherboard.tv/2011/1/11/goodbye-tevatron-the-u-s-s-largest-particle-accelerator Tevatron collider. Weird bumps happen; it might not mean anything. But, as it sta…
Fermilab's Tevatron collider is picking up something unexplainable. Particles aren't behaving like they should. It has to do with the top quark, one of the fundamental particles. It sounds simplistic in a way, but when particles collide and shoot
