Professor of Physics Michael Weissman's expertise employed in forensic polling analysis cited as one of the New York Times' annual "Year in Ideas" stories.

Karin Dahmen has been elected a new member-at-large of the executive committee of the American Physical Society's Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics. Her three-year term will begin March 2010.

UPDATE--Geneva, 30 November 2009. CERN's Large Hadron Collider has today become the worlds highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. This exceeds the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratorys Tevatron collider since 2001. It marks another important milestone on the road to first physics at the LHC in 2010. Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. Beams were first tuned to produce collisions in the ATLAS detector, which recorded its first candidate for collisions at 14:22 this afternoon.

Mason group develops technique to map out changes in conductance through a carbon nanotube quantum dot using superconducting tunneling spectroscopy

Professor of Physics Klaus Schulten and graduate student Leonardo Trabuco and postdoctoral researcher James Gumbart are using the computer as a microscope to decipher the chemical details of ribosome function. Two new studies reveal in unprecedented detail how the ribosome interacts with other molecules to assemble new proteins and guide them toward their destinations in biological cells.