Ever been to one? A few months ago I was allocated two days of beamtime at the Advanced Photon Source, which is part of DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. The facility accelerates electrons to energies of 7 GeV (equivalent to moving at more than 99% the speed of light), then uses large magnets to convert the…

In the 1880s, the town of Total Wreck was home to a thriving silver mine and a few hundred people. Now, all that remains are a few stone walls and caved-in tunnels. The geology in the area is very strange: I found a bedrock cut on the side of a stream-bank, with rock mostly a…