The Verge - Photo Essays

The Large Hadron Collider in pictures: using big technology to investigate tiny things

2013-06-19T12:30:49Z

"You're pushing the Higgs too much."

Such has been Peter Higgs' admonishment to the CERN communications department in recent times. The British theoretical physicist, who has contributed both his work and name to the prediction of an elementary particle called the Higgs boson, is unhappy to have the Large Hadron Collider so closely associated with the search for it. Having now established that particle's existence to a high degree of certainty — there's only a one in 10 million chance that CERN’s observations are not the result of the Higgs boson — the LHC is running the risk of being perceived as an expensive one-trick pony that's already completed its objective.

To allow that misconception to fester would be doing a massive disservice to the breadth and variety of research going on in and around the labs straddling the Franco-Swiss border. Among its many achievements, the European Organization for Nuclear Research can count the development of the World Wide Web — which Tim Berners-Lee and a group of students cobbled together in a corridor due to the lack of available room for their project.

As James Gillies, head of CERN’s Communications Group explains, “we do basic, curiosity-driven research” into the fundamentals of science and the universe. The 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider — a subterranean circuit of vacuum-sealed steel pipes, surrounded by a network of eight superconducting magnetic arrays, four giant detector stations, and a plethora of cooling and data-collection machinery — is affectionately known as “the fastest racetrack on the planet.” To back that claim, Gillies notes that the cryogenically-cooled magnets can accelerate beams of hydrogen protons to the ludicrous speed of 11,000 laps per second (or 99.999 percent the speed of light). Smashing together two of these beams travelling in opposite directions generates an enormous release of energy, which is in turn measured by CERN's researchers as they probe the boundaries of our knowledge about the universe. The Higgs boson, as professor Higgs underlines, is just one small part of that quest for insight.

Since February of this year, the LHC has laid dormant, undergoing upgrades and tweaks in preparation for coming back online in the spring of 2015 for a (hopefully uninterrupted) three-year run of gathering more data. There remain plenty of unknowns for the researchers to investigate, such as the theorized existence of dark energy and dark matter, so the Collider’s future looks to be at least as busy and productive as its past. In order to spread this message and to give the public a better understanding of what the LHC does, CERN is using the present period of downtime to tour journalists around the particle accelerator’s cavernous detector stations and underground pipe network. It’s a fascinating look at how big industrial machinery is helping to answer questions about infinitesimally small things.

Flying forever, one day at a time: solar-powered airplane embarks on coast-to-coast voyage

2013-05-03T20:45:03Z

In 1999, Bertrand Piccard traveled around the world in a balloon, without stopping a single time. Now, he's embarking on a journey across the United States — from San Francisco to New York — in an airplane with infinite gas mileage. The Solar Impulse HB-SIA is an electric aircraft powered entirely by solar panels, with 11,628 monocrystallane solar cells spread across its enormous Boeing 747-sized wing. Batteries, charged by those solar panels, take over in the evening.

On Friday, the craft began the first leg of its US voyage, from Mountain View, CA, to Phoenix, AZ — a 19-hour trip in the lightweight single-seater aircraft. One day at a time, with long breaks inbetween, the airplane will take two more months to reach its final destination in New York City. You can track the flight live.

Last year, the Solar Impulse flew from Europe to Africa in its first intercontinental flight, and the craft had its first international flight in 2011, but today the Swiss company's cofounder and chairman is showing the United States what solar power can do. The vision: an aircraft that can fly indefinitely without consuming any fuel whatsoever. This morning, we traveled to Moffett Field to witness the occasion.

Picturing two decades of music video history, from Michel Gondry to OK Go

2013-04-22T15:00:04Z

The best music videos usually boil down to a single, iconic image, whether it's Michael Jackson jumping onto his toes or the Lego White Stripes. They look good on TV, but strangely eerie in person, as we discovered this month at the Museum of the Moving Image's Spectacle exhibit, which gathered together dozens of artifacts from music-video history. It turns out seeing OK Go's jumpsuits in person is every bit as strange as it sounds.

Photography by Michael Shane

My lockdown: here's what it was like living in Boston this week

2013-04-20T03:06:01Z

I’ve lived in Boston (or one of its neighboring towns) for almost 14 years, and I can’t remember a time that the entire MBTA, our public transportation system, shut down. No trains, no buses, no commuter rail. Maybe on 9/11, and parts of the system have been out of service during particularly brutal winter storms (or the occasional hurricane), but I can’t recall a day like today. Thanks to a wild manhunt for two young men who allegedly detonated explosives during the Boston Marathon, the entire region was held hostage for nearly a day until law enforcement was eventually able to tighten the noose.

The days immediately following Monday’s attack were relatively quiet and as normal as they can be — considering bombs were detonated in the heart of New England’s biggest city — but that all changed late Thursday evening. By Friday morning, sections of Boston and its surrounding cities (including Cambridge and Watertown, where an MIT police officer was killed and where the suspect was eventually found) were under a “shelter-in-place” order. No one was to leave their house for any reason, businesses were encouraged to stay closed, and, of course, the MBTA was completely closed. Eventually, this order encompassed all of the city of Boston, and hundreds of thousands of people found themselves huddled in their homes, letting law enforcement do its work.

It was an incredibly tense and strange day, perhaps even more so than the day of the bombing. For me, watching that day’s events unfold from the relative safety of my Somerville condo, the day was spent processing what had happened to my city rather than being in active fear for my safety. The day of the bombings, I had very little concern over leaving my house to walk the dog, or picking up my wife as she made her way home. However, today’s events essentially paralyzed the entire region and made the simple act of walking downstairs to take out the trash a risk that just wasn’t worth taking. While it was incredibly unlikely that my specific neighborhood would be at risk, there was zero indication of where the bomber was throughout the day. And the area’s small enough that anything was really possible — just for one “too close for comfort” example, the apartment where the two bombers lived was two blocks from my old home.

With the entire city shut down and nowhere to go, we were simply captives of TV and Twitter, watching the drama unfold. Unfortunately, both mediums can become quite the irritating echo chamber, though Boston’s local TV news was surprisingly balanced and overall fairly useful this week. You want to know what’s happening, you get hooked on the constant flood of “information,” but after a few hours you realize you’re learning very little (and, at times, feasting on a banquet of misinformation). Disconnecting isn’t really an option, either. Trying to just relax and watch a movie, read a book, or even do work doesn’t go so well when you can’t stop looking at Twitter to see how your friends are holding up or if there’s any actual news to be caught up on.

Early in the day’s proceedings, there was a huge amount of police interest in a Watertown residence, and from all the news it sounded like the suspect was close to being apprehended — I started to feel like the events would be over by lunch and we could get back to real life. But before long, it was clear that an apprehension wasn’t imminent, and we were plunged back into uncertainty. The Red Sox and Bruins cancelled their games, and the possibility of the city being held under siege for the rest of the day, through the weekend, and even into next week didn’t seem far-fetched.

As for the city itself, its streets were deserted in a way I’ve never seen before except during the biggest snowstorm — and even then, the weather forecast gives you a reasonably good idea of when the snow will stop and you can get outside to shovel. There was no such forecast today.

Right around 6pm, the shelter-in-place order was surprisingly lifted, with officials saying they couldn’t reasonably expect the city to stay shut down indefinitely — but citizens should still exercise extreme caution. Fortunately, the suspect was apprehended hours later, and it looks like Boston will be rewarded with a “normal” weekend. Of course, things won’t be normal — this was one of the strangest and most unsettling weeks the city has faced — but at least the Red Sox will be back at Fenway.

Update: As pointed out by an astute commenter below, Boston and the surrounding cities were similarly shut down during February's huge blizzard — a fact I didn't recall because I was lucky enough to be out of town that week. While the circumstances surrounding this week's events were obviously different, this wasn't a totally unprecedented move to make.

'Could you poison your child?': images from a century of medical propaganda

2013-04-12T18:39:48Z

The US National Library of Medicine is much more than a library about medicine. Founded in 1836, the Maryland-based NLM is home to the world's largest collection of biomedical resources, including old books, videos, and scientific studies. It also houses a fascinating online collection of public service announcements and health-related propaganda — a century-spanning trove of posters, advertisements, and pamphlets from just about every corner of the globe.

"It's meant to be cultural, in the broadest sense of the word," Paul Theermin, head of the NLM's images and archives, said in an interview with The Verge. Until the 1950s, the NLM operated in tandem with the National Museum of Health and Medicine. When it split off, the clinical materials were placed with the Armed Forces Medical Library (now under the Department of Defense), leaving the NLM to manage all social and cultural documents.

The NLM, now under the domain of US Health and Human Services, launched its first website in the 1990s, before ramping up its efforts in 2009 with the launch of its Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) database. Today, its online collection encompasses more than 70,000 digitized images, 42,000 of which are in the public domain. Collection manager Ginny Roth says she aims to upload between 600 and 700 new documents each year, pulling from NLM's existing physical archive, as well as new materials received from donors or other public institutions. Thus far, the library hasn't digitized even half of its archive.

The majority of NLM's images are portraits — centuries-old drawings of renowned doctors — though there are thousands of photographs, as well — slice-of-life stills of old hospital wards and patients. But perhaps most intriguing is its collection of public health posters. Some are iconic relics from the global AIDS campaign, others are more obscure, puzzling, or implicitly racist. Each, however, is its own time capsule — a snapshot of not only the major public health issues from a given era, but the aesthetic, political, and social norms that informed their visual representation.

Below are some of the most noteworthy. To browse through the full collection, click here.

Print yourself as a gummi bear at Tokyo's FabCafe

2013-03-22T14:20:04Z

There's no shortage of cafes in Tokyo, but FabCafe has a little more on its menu than most. Opened just over a year ago, the establishment offers its own laser cutter that customers can rent by the hour, and also collaborates with the 3D printer showroom upstairs. The showroom is called Cube and features several printers made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems, making FabCafe a hot spot in Tokyo for anyone who needs something fabricated but can't justify the multi-thousand dollar outlay on a machine of their own.

But FabCafe and Cube's collaborations stretch beyond the pragmatic and veer into the surreal. Recently the two ran a promotion where female customers could create Valentines Day chocolates made from 3D-printed molds of their own faces; in Japan, Valentines Day is exclusively a holiday for women to give chocolates and other gifts to men. However, March 14th marks White Day, where the men must reciprocate the offer to their partners. What to do for the girl that gave you her own edible face? Well, FabCafe had the obvious answer — 3D-print your whole body in the form of gummi sweets. We went along to see exactly how this went down.