Last Saturday marked the 40th anniversary of an historic event: In 1973, a team of research pioneers extracted hard X-rays for the first time from SLAC's SPEAR accelerator.

SLAC Deputy Director Emeritus and Stanford University Hoover Senior Fellow Sidney Drell was one of 12 distinguished researchers presented with the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in a Feb. 1 ceremony at the White House.

In 1971, physicist Burton Richter of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center was building a new type of particle collider called a storage ring.