Presented by James Cryan. SLAC has just unveiled the world's first X-ray laser, the LCLS. This machine produces pulses of X-rays that are ten billion times brighter than those from conventional sources. One of the goals of this machine is...
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...
Perhaps the most significant event in intellectual history has occurred over the past several decades, a convergence of the sciences, a blurring of the distinctions between disciplines, from physics to chemistry to biology. Fundamental questions about human existence have been...
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...
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...
Water, H2O, is familiar to everyone - it shapes our bodies and our planet. But despite its abundance, water has remained a mystery, exhibiting many strange properties that are still not understood. Why does the liquid have an unusually large...
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...
