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The same kind of chemical coating used to shed rainwater from aircraft and automobile windows also dramatically enhances the sensitivity and reaction time of hydrogen sensors. Hydrogen sensor technology is a critical component for safety and other practical concerns in the proposed hydrogen economy. For example, hydrogen sensors will detect leaks from hydrogen powered cars and fueling stations long before the gas becomes an explosive hazard.

When Alice famously went down the rabbit hole, she ended up in Wonderland. Now, a group of US scientists from fields as diverse as microbiology and particle physics, rock mechanics and molecular evolution are proposing to go down their own version of the rabbit hole into the scientific wonderland of a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

The way that a horse trots intrigued Leland Stanford. After a term as California's governor and with a fortune assembled from building the US transcontinental railway, Stanford lived the life of a country gentleman near his Palo Alto Stock Farm.

Officials at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory today (March 4, 2005) dedicated the MINOS experiment and the beam that will send subatomic particles called neutrinos from Fermilab, near Chicago, to a particle detector in Minnesota. The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert Jr., Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of the DOE Office of Science, officially inaugurated the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment.

One hot day in August, particle physicists turned cold. That's the day the International Technology Recommendation Panel (ITRP) announced the decision to pursue "cold" superconducting technology for what physicists hope will be the world's next big particle accelerator, the International Linear Collider. Going cold, instead of recommending a "warm" option that had also been under development, has far-reaching consequences for laboratories, scientists, industries and governments across the globe. What does "cold" mean, and why did particle physics choose superconducting technology?

Toward the end of a ten-year experiment in 1991, postdoc Hungye Dai of the University of Utah was puzzling over some really unusual data. The experiment was Fly's Eye, which pioneered a new method of studying ultra-high-energy cosmic rays by monitoring the faint flashes of ultraviolet light produced in the sky when the particles hit the upper atmosphere.

It was a true Eureka moment if there ever was one. On the night of December 6, 1979, an obscure Stanford Linear Accelerator Center postdoc was up late, sweating over an even more obscure problem about particles called magnetic monopoles. Looking at his calculations the next day, the usually low-key Alan Guth annotated the words "Spectacular Realization" at the top of the page. Guth had discovered cosmic inflation, an idea which some have later called the most important in cosmology since the big bang.

At almost any particle physics conference, meeting, or lunch table, the phrase "physics beyond the Standard Model" is heard over and over again. What's wrong with the Standard Model, anyway? Why are physicists so sure that there is something beyond it? And why do they think they can find it anytime soon?

Kurt Woschnagg has been waiting nine days to catch a plane to the South Pole. He flew for 15 hours from San Francisco to New Zealand, waited several days to spend another eight hours in a cargo plane to McMurdo Station in Antarctica, only to wait again for the weather to clear.

Watching flies fly may not seem like high-tech science, but for researchers using the Western Hemisphere's most brilliant X-rays, located at the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, it not only helps explain how insects fly but also may someday aid in understanding human heart function.