Students come into science from a variety of backgrounds, facing a variety of circumstances. The Fisk-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, a partnership between Fisk and Vanderbilt universities in Nashville, is meant to take that into account. It helps students overcome external hurdles to reach their potential in Ph.D.-level STEM research. Meet three scientists connected by the program.
Video games and physics have more in common than you might think. Both require a willingness to approach a problem from multiple different directions. Read three ways to succeed when dealing with both subatomic and virtual realms.
Respondents to Symmetry’s survey about what it’s like to earn a Ph.D. in particle physics or astrophysics offer their views of the experience. Nearly 2,000 people worldwide complete the scientific rite of passage each year. Yet for many people, the process remains mysterious.
The more than 300 responses to Symmetry’s survey described a challenging, multifaceted experience that goes far beyond job training, and even beyond the scientific goal of studying the fundamental nature of the universe.
A new observation by the LHCb experiment finds that charm quarks behave differently than their antiparticle counterparts.
A Swedish university tapped the founding director of CERN’s artist-in-residence program to curate a new art exhibit inspired by physics. The pieces are not literal translations of physics concepts to other media or illustrations of physics principles or phenomena. Physics was a spark for the artists, sometimes very clearly and sometimes more tangentially.
What if you could accelerate particles to higher energies in only a few meters? This is the alluring potential of an up-and-coming technology called plasma wakefield acceleration. Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size.
Growing up in South Africa, the first language that science writer Sibusiso Biyela learned was Zulu, the most common mother tongue in the country. But the scientific content he consumed as a child—movies, cartoons and documentaries—was in English. Biyela aims to bring science back to South Africa’s Zulu communities.
Scientists have proposed building the International Linear Collider, which would be the longest linear collider in the world, in the Kitakami mountains in the Iwate prefecture of northern Japan. Scientists had called on the Japanese government to come to a decision about whether they support hosting the ILC by today’s meeting of the International Committee for Future Accelerators. The Japanese government declined to stake a claim to hosting the ILC.
One day in 2017, the idea to detect particles that had potentially been escaping the LHC for years unnoticed by the gigantic detectors suddenly became feasible. The story of the latest experiment approved for installation at the Large Hadron Collider starts with a theorist and a question about dark matter.
Given the popularity of our first article about physics concepts with deceptively common names, Symmetry is back with 10 more seemingly normal words that mean something different in a science context. Some of this science sounds awfully familiar.