Professor Egil Lillestol of Bergen University has been pushing thorium for some years now, and thinks that Norway should set the trend in building a prototype accelerator-driven reactor in which a massive particle accelerator converts thorium-232 to uranium-233 by irradiating it with slow (spallation) neutrons generated by the impact of a 1.6 GeV proton beam on a lead target.
Although the probe would carry no cameras in the classic sense, its onboard instruments would include a low-energy charged particle experiment, a magnetometer, a cosmic ray detector, and an energetic neutral atom detector.
So physicists are eagerly seeking more, and two groups working at Fermilab, a particle-physics laboratory near Chicago, think they have found a candidate.
Half of the atoms in a five-nanometre particle are on its surface, which can make it many times more toxic than expected by weight alone.
They are known as fermions, after Enrico Fermi, the physicist who built the first nuclear reactor, and who also gave his name to Fermilab, a particle-physics laboratory near Chicago.
ECONOMIST: Particle physics makes sense, but it assumes too much
Working on a theory to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein's special relativity, he realised his equations predicted a corresponding anti-particle for every particle in existence - identical in every respect, but with an opposite electrical charge.
"I discovered I was more interested in talking about how science affects people, about the emotional side", than "becoming an expert in something maybe 10 people cared about", said Ben Lillie, who was a high-energy particle theorist before he founded The Story Collider.
For instance, scientists need to use pi when calculating how "loops" -- particles that transform themselves into other particles, and then come back together to make the original particle again -- contribute to a particle's mass.
The result is the social-science equivalent of a particle accelerator or a space-based telescope, says Robert Willis, a University of Michigan economics professor and the survey's principal investigator.
In addition, production will start this year at a newly acquired particle-board plant in Novgorod, Russia.
The wavefunction describes just how wave-like a particle actually is.
The old linear accelerator at Stanford was repurposed, turning it from the machine that co-discovered a particle known as the charm quark (thus winning its operators a Nobel prize) into a factory for making particles called B mesons.
The boson earned a nickname - the "God particle" - supposedly because of its importance to the Standard Model.
BBC: Peter Higgs: honour for physicist who proposed particle
However, one of those is when a particle is slow-moving and massive.
ECONOMIST: Two new ways to detect the elusive stuff of the universe
Detecting the Higgs boson takes a lot of particle collisions -- there's only one observed event in every trillion proton-proton collisions, CERN said.
Indeed, until they do so, they are reluctant to definitively crown the boson, preferring often to say just that they have found a "Higgs-like" particle.
When a meson and an anti-meson of any description are created in a particle accelerator, they normally fly off in opposite directions.
The idea initiated a decades-long effort to detect the particle in experiments.
BBC: Peter Higgs: honour for physicist who proposed particle
And we might be provided with clues that reveal the trail to unraveling the ultimate holy grail of fundamental particle physics -- a quantum theory of gravity.
The ALA analyzed particle pollution levels two ways: short-term particle pollution, or high spikes in the level of soot and other toxins in the air that last a few hours to a few weeks, and year-round particle pollution, or the annual average of particle pollution levels.
Mr. Higgs received a round of applause as he entered the auditorium, and shed a tear when news of the Higgs-like particle was announced.
Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons -- and the more Higgs bosons a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.
LHCb, one of the six separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, is particularly suited for examining what is called "charge-parity violation" - slight differences in behaviour if a given particle is swapped for its antimatter counterpart (changing its charge) and turned around one of its axes (changing its parity).
Readers without a grasp of the so-called standard model in particle physics may well flounder in the chapter on the physics prize.
Coal-fired power plants are a big source of particle pollution.
That Tron-ish, equalizer-like graphic is actually a 3D representation of particle activity left behind by cosmic rays interacting within NOvA, the Department of Energy's under construction neutrino detector.
Composed of light-absorbing, colloidal quantum dots linked to carbon-based fullerene nanoparticles, these tiny two-particle systems can convert light to electricity in a precisely controlled way.
FORBES: Quantum Dots and Fullerenes Team Up For Better Nanoscale Solar Panels
Short-term particle pollution measures the number of times in a year when levels spike above healthy standards for several days to several weeks.
Watching football's mad genius, Bill Belichick, try to think his way around San Francisco's ball-hawking beasts would have been the football equivalent of a particle accelerator.
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