Shrinking travel budgets and the availability of online training have conspired against today's professional associations, the typical first-victims of operational austerity.  Public institutions eager to appease their elected leaders are especially quick to freeze travel during challenging economic times.  This, however, may be a grave mistake.  Why? Because there are hidden, undisclosed benefits to membership associations that are worthy not only of discussion, but of careful consideration by corporate and governmental executives trying to save a buck.  

This is the second part of a section taken from Chapter 3 of the book "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab". The chapter recounts the pioneering measurement of the Z mass by the CDF detector, and the competition with SLAC during the summer of 1989. The title of the post is the same as the one of chapter 3, and it refers to the way some SLAC physicists called their Fermilab colleagues, whose hadron collider was to their eyes obviously inferior to the electron-positron linear collider.

Satellite data have detected widespread water within ancient explosive volcanic deposits on the Moon. That means its interior may contain more indigenous water than previously believed. The ancient deposits are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior.

A cold beer on a hot day or a whisky nightcap beside a coal fire. A well earned glass can loosen your thinking until you feel able to pierce the mysteries of life, death, love and identity. In moments like these, alcohol and the cosmic can seem intimately entwined.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the universe is awash with alcohol. In the gas that occupies the space between the stars, the hard stuff is almost all-pervasive. What is it doing there? Is it time to send out some big rockets to start collecting it?

Last week-end Padova researchers tested the first calorimeter and tracker prototypes of the iMPACT project at the APSS/TIFPA Proton Therapy Facility in Trento (Italy).

iMPACT (innovative Medical Proton Achromatic Calorimeter and Tracker) is a project led by Piero Giubilato, who won an ERC consolidator grant from the European Union. The project aims to develop a high resolution and high rate (>100 kHz/cm2) proton Computed Tomography (pCT) scanner. The scanner will combine a highly-segmented range calorimeter made of PVT scintillators, for energy measurements, and a silicon pixel tracker, for trajectory reconstructions. 

There is ongoing concern about species extinction but it isn't just the fact that 99.999% of species have never been cataloged, so it's impossible to know how many are extinct, it's that Mother Nature may cause it long before we could.

A new study suggests nature's ecological web is so tenuous that it's amazing anything survived this long; even the smell of a predator can have disastrous effects in populations of small size in flies. They spend less time eating, more time being vigilant, have less sex, and produce fewer offspring. 

The Trump administration is regularly accused by green activists in media as being opposed to science, but only the science they accept. On one recent policy decision the opposite is true and EPA is taking a stand against junk science by greens who had been unchecked before. That decision is related to the pesticide chlorpyrifos.

Everyone has heard about bisphenol A (BPA).  It’s primarily used as a raw material to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins, both of which are high performance materials<

It's not an 80/20 rule but if you are addicted to opiods you are likely to be visiting a small number of physicians in Ontario, according to a new analysis.

At a distance of a mind-blowing 750 million light years from Earth, astronomers using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system made up of 10 radio telescopes across the U.S., say they've been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes.

They did it by observing several frequencies of radio signals emitted by these supermassive black holes. Over time, they have essentially been able to plot their trajectory and confirm them as a visual binary system. In other words, they claim they've observed these black holes in orbit with one another, though it's really inference.