The Discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN
On the morning of 4 July 2012, in an auditorium at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the director-general of the laboratory stepped to a…
25 min read
Category
Technology
The First Flight at Kitty Hawk
On the morning of Thursday, 17 December 1903, at a quarter past ten, on a stretch of soft sand at the base of the…
25 min read
The Voyager Probes
A spacecraft the size of a small car hangs against the deep black of interstellar space, the white parabolic high-gain antenna dish pointed back…
24 min read
The Transistor and the Birth of Solid State Electronics
In December 1947, in a sixth-floor laboratory at 463 West Street in Manhattan, two physicists at Bell Telephone Laboratories built a small device out…
22 min read
The Intel 4004 and the Birth of the Microprocessor
On 15 November 1971 a small company in Santa Clara, California, took out a two-page advertisement in Electronic News…
23 min read
The Laser and the History of Stimulated Emission
At 4 p.m. on Monday, 16 May 1960, in a small basement laboratory at Hughes Research Laboratories, a quiet, sandy-haired physicist named Theodore Harold…
26 min read
The Global Positioning System
Most introductions to the Global Positioning System say that it works by trilateration.
25 min read
180 Years of Scientific American
Scientific American, the American popular-science magazine, has been continuously published since its first issue on 28 August 1845, and the magazine is the oldest…
20 min read
Why Britain Needed a Popular Science Magazine in 1956
New Scientist, the international weekly English-language science and technology magazine, has been continuously published since its first issue on 22 November 1956, and the…
18 min read
The American Answer to Nature Magazine
Science, the peer-reviewed general scientific journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has been continuously published since its first issue…
19 min read
How Nature Became the Worlds Most Influential Science Journal
Nature, the international weekly journal of science, has been continuously published since its first issue on 4 November 1869, and the journal has been,…
22 min read
The Discovery of Penicillin
In September 1928 a mould that had drifted in through an open window killed the bacteria on a forgotten Petri dish; turning that observation…
19 min read
The Discovery of the Structure of DNA
On the morning of Saturday 28 February 1953, two young men walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced, over a beer at…
24 min read
The Apollo Program and the Lunar Landing
On the morning of July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket the height of a thirty-six-storey building lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at…
22 min read
The Discovery of the Neutrino
On 4 December 1930, an Austrian theoretical physicist sat down at his desk in Zurich to write one of the strangest letters in the…
23 min read
The Transistor
For most of the first half of the twentieth century, the active element of every electronic circuit was a glass-and-metal vacuum tube: a heated…
25 min read
The First Artificial Satellite
The Rocket Race That Was Never Just a Rocket Race On the evening of 4 October 1957, a polished aluminium sphere the size…
23 min read
The Voyager Mission and the Outer Planets
The two Voyager spacecraft would not have been launched in 1977 had the geometry of the solar system not obliged us…
22 min read
The Compact Disc
The Compact Disc was the consumer audio format that replaced the vinyl LP in the early 1980s. It was a five-inch,…
23 min read
The LIGO Gravitational Wave Detection
On 14 September 2015, at 09:50:45 UTC, the two detectors of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory recorded a signal that lasted a fifth…
21 min read
The James Webb Space Telescope
At a glance: the James Webb Space Telescope is a space-based infrared telescope launched on 25 December 2021 from the Guiana Space Centre near…
23 min read
The CERN Large Hadron Collider
A wide concrete cavern opens up beneath the Swiss-French border. Two bright steel cylinders, twenty-five metres long and fifteen wide, hang from overhead cranes…
23 min read
Admiral Hugh Sinclair and the Case for Putting Him Back
Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair ran MI6 from 1923 to 1939, the longest tenure in the service's history. He built the signals intelligence apparatus that…
28 min read
The ENIAC
The Moore School had been one of the leading electrical engineering schools in the United States since the 1920s.…
22 min read