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Opinion

We make them tougher in Texas

Need electronics that can survive the harshest radiation on Earth? Texas has got y’all covered.

Explainer

How to catch subatomic particles wakeboarding in the universe’s most perfect liquid

The hottest, densest, and most perfect fluid in the universe has a behavior surprisingly similar to water rippling around a speedboat.

Explainer

The beautiful theory that gives particle physicists a headache

The most powerful force of nature is also the most unpredictable, and our blind spots could be hiding the next big discovery.

Explainer

Is the Higgs boson as fundamental as it seems?

The Higgs boson is unlike anything we have discovered. Could a hidden substructure be yet another one of its quirks?

Opinion

Your phone is smarter than the world’s biggest particle detectors (but not for long)

Smart detectors will let us learn from “bad” data and could dramatically reduce the time between groundbreaking discoveries.

Feature

Young, bold, and innately curious

Undergrads at the University of Virginia are building detectors for one of the world’s biggest experiments and learning more than just particle physics along the way.