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UPDATE -  In the time following this lecture, aspects of the research featured here have been disproven or come into question. See this article from Chemical & Engineering News for important context before viewing this archival SLAC public lecture. -------...

Accelerators are huge, expensive tubes sometimes miles long that produce high energies for smashing protons or making intense X-ray light. 21st-century technology has taken us from the room-sized ENIAC to microprocessors that fit in your pocket. Can the same be...

Astronomers infer that the universe contains huge amounts of a mysterious, invisible substance called "dark matter". To account for the structure of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the universe must contain six times more dark matter than ordinary atomic matter...

One of the greatest challenges humanity faces is finding a way to provide the world's population with clean energy. Since sunlight is our most abundant source of energy, solar cells, which absorb sunlight and create electricity, will become increasingly important...

We humans interact with our physical environment through our senses of touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. One of the great challenges in developing artificial intelligence and natural interfaces between humans and machines is finding ways to emulate those senses...

Movies allow us to experience and understand worlds we may never be able to visit. During this presentation Bill Schlotter will explain how to make movies of magnetic storage bits, which reside in our laptops and internet data centers and...

This has been an exciting summer for particle physicists who have collectively spent the last forty years hunting for the Higgs boson. Last year, ATLAS and CMS, the two largest experiments analyzing collisions produced by the Large Hadron Collider, observed...

The Mary Rose, built in 1511, was the flagship of King Henry VIII. She sank in 1545 while en route to confront the French fleet in battle. The ship lay undersea for 440 years before being raised in 1985. The...

An exploding star, or supernova, is one of the most violent events in the universe, giving off a billion stars' worth of light. Even thousands of years later, the remnants of these explosions are among the most beautiful and mysterious...

As electronics become faster and more powerful and the components of integrated circuits shrink, scientists are bumping up against the limitations imposed by fundamental physics, forcing them to invent new technologies. Today computer hard drives store information in tiny magnets...

Glaciers are shrinking, gas prices are rising - so is our energy-hungry way of life doomed? We believe, no. Every day our sun provides us with more than enough energy, if only we can catch it and make it available...