SLAC has converted its giant particle accelerator into the world's first X-ray laser. By a billion fold the world's brightest X-ray source, the laser packs a trillion photons into pulses as short as a millionth of a billionth of a...
Presented by Wendy Mao. The deeper we go into the Earth, the higher the pressure. At the pressures found within the center of our planet, minerals do not simply compress. Pressure dramatically alters all materials properties, in the process creating...
Presented by JoAnne Hewett. Extra dimensions of space may be present in our universe. Their discovery would dramatically change our view of the cosmos and would prompt many questions. How do they hide? What is their shape? How many are...
Andrea Foster uses x-rays to determine the forms of potentially toxic elements in environmentally-important matrices such as water, sediments, plants, and microorganisms. In this free public lecture, Foster will discuss her research on arsenic, which is called the silent killer...
Archimedes (287-212 BC), who is famous for shouting 'Eureka' (I found it) is considered one of the most brilliant thinkers of all times. The 10th-century parchment document known as the “Archimedes Palimpsest” is the unique source for two of the...
The enigmatic neutrinos are among the most abundant of the tiny particles that make up our universe. They are a billion times more abundant than the particles of which the earth and we humans are made. Thus, to understand the...
Everyone knows that lasers can be bright. From Goldfinger to Star Wars, intense lasers carry a "death ray" reputation in popular culture. But what is intense light, anyway?
According to Smith, protein crystallography allows scientists to design drugs in a much more efficient way than the standard methods traditionally used by large drug companies, which can cost close to a billion dollars and take 10 to 15 years...
When we explore Nature at distances much smaller than the size of an atom, we find new and mysterious physical principles. At such small sizes, particles are governed by "quantum theory". Quantum theory tells us that some aspects of particle...
Most people have intuitive associations with the word "magnetism" based on everyday life: refrigerator magnets, the compass, north and south poles, or someone's "magnetic personality". Few people, however, realize how complicated the phenomenon really is, how much research still deals...
The Universe appears to be flat, accelerating and lightweight. In this talk, I will explain what these terms mean, how we developed this view and its implications. I will also discuss the connection between cosmology and particle physics experiments being...
In our normal everyday lives we are exposed to an incredibly complex chemical soup consisting of an enormous variety of different chemical compounds. Many of these compounds contain metal atoms which, once inside us, can either fulfill roles that are...
