The Stanford Linear Accelerator. Credit: SLAC.

Luckily, there is a particle accelerator right here in the Bay Area. Last year, I took an intrepid group down to the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) to learn more about the these giant expensive research labs.

SLAC maintains an extensive public outreach program. An extensive tour (mine was 2 hours with very in-depth exploration of the facility), public lectures, weekly colloquia, and even science competitions for high schoolers.

I was surprised to find a wealth of research beyond the typical particle colliding at the facility. Many researchers use the state of the art facilities to study basic elements of our life, including water.

On Tuesday, Anders Nilsson is discussing his research on water at SLAC, an in-depth look at some of the stranger properties of water: its high heat capacity, how it is more dense than ice, even insight on using water as a power source (by splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen). Water: The Strangest Liquid, Tuesday February 24th 730-830PM at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

However, our continued economics woes are threatening physical science research. SLAC is getting the brunt of money cut, missing out on $23 million of requested funding. In response, SLAC laid off 125 of its 1600 employees and shut down its PEP-II collider last year.

SLAC Public Lecture Series
The SLAC Public Lecture Series opens the doors to the inner workings of SLAC for the local nonscientific community. Find out what SLAC is all about: the research, the facilities, and the people that make this a world-class research institute.

SLAC Colloquium
The intellectual watering hole for the entire laboratory, where you can hear talks intended for a general audience on a wide variety of subjects. The colloquium will be returning later this year.

SLAC Science Bowl for High School Students
SLAC hosts an annual Regional Science Bowl for teams of high school students. The Science Bowl is a question-and-answer competition with buzzers, judges, and time keepers for high school teams of 5 students and 1 faculty coach. This year's competition is on February 28th.

SLAC Tour Information
Tours of SLAC will be available again later this year. On the tour, you get an extensive look at the operation of the accelerator, including a peek into the Klystron Gallery.

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There are dozens of events celebrating Darwin this month. You can also join QUEST at one of them. On February 26th, QUEST will be screening our half-hour documentary, "Chasing Beetles, Finding Darwin" at the California Academy of Sciences. We'll be joined by two scientists featured in the story. You can get more info or buy tickets here.

Listen to the Investigating Darwin's Legacy radio report online.

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Magnets in the LHC. Photo copyright CERN

When protons smash together at velocities approaching the speed of light, tiny short-lived particles are produced. If we can see these particles and learn how they behave, we can answer some pretty important physics questions — like what, exactly, is mass? The Exploratorium has a great website that explains physics' Standard Model — what matter is made of, and how the different components of matter interact. In his op-ed piece in the New York Times, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene describes the particles that physicists are looking for: the Higgs boson, the supersymmetric particles, and the transdimensional particles. Is there really a fourth dimension? Or a fifth or sixth? We may soon find out.

The latest nickname for the LHC is "the why machine." That moniker originated on the physics blog Cosmic Variance. Hopefully this feat of engineering will explain why E=mc2. Or, say some, just open up a microscopic black hole that will swallow the entire universe. This is exceedingly unlikely, but, says the Telegraph, some scientists have still received death threats from folks concerned about the impending end of the universe.

These mysterious particles may or may not be linked to the end of the universe, but they were certainly abundant at the beginning, with the Big Bang. To learn more about the Big Bang and the evidence for its occurrence, check out QUEST's interview with Berkeley physicist George Smoot — he won the Nobel Prize for detecting and analyzing the Big Bang's leftover radiation.

Parts of the Large Hadron Collider were designed and constructed by scientists here in the Bay Area. Scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed the LHC’s distribution feed boxes, which connect electrical power to the focusing magnets. And scientist from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center designed the ATLAS pixel detector, which, like a giant digital camera, records what happens after particles collide.

If you're more interested in pictures than particles, then check out National Geographic's photos of the LHC –- it is a beautiful machine.

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