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What’s Taken Up Residence In
Panofsky Grove?
By Shawne Neeper
 Balanced mid-stride over seismic metal
shoes, sculptor Douglas Abdell’s welded bronze piece, entitled
Kryeti-Aekyad, is making its SLAC debut in Panofsky Grove, across from
the Cafeteria. Its jaunty, angular legs stand seven feet high and ten
feet heel-to-toe. The sculpture comes to SLAC through the Stanford Panel
on Outdoor Art.
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Disorderly Conduct: The Unusual
Behavior of Nanomaterials
By Heather Rock Woods
Extremely small pieces of a material
aren’t always a chip off a bigger block. How nanomaterials behave is
tremendously important to know when trying to understand the roles of
mineral nanoparticles in the environment, or design devices for
nanotechnology.
Researchers taking data at SSRL and the
Advanced Photon Source (APS) in Illinois recently found that zinc
sulfide at 3.5 nanometers (nm) in size (3.5 billionths of a meter)
behaves quite differently than ‘bulk’ zinc sulfide (several hundred nm
and up.
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Art Meets Science: SSRL to Join
in Stanford Campus-Wide Project
By Davide Castelvecchi
 Scientists at SSRL are
joining in an unusual collaboration to study and preserve an artistic
treasure from the Renaissance.
The focus is the
recently restored painting entitled Virgin, Child and St. John, by
Jacopo del Sellaio (pronounced YA-coh-poh del Sel-LAH-yo), who lived in
Florence from about 1441 to 1493 and was an apprentice of the
better-known artist Sandro Botticelli.
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SSI Special Report: The Quigg
Challenge
By Shawne Neeper and
Davide Castelvecchi
In his opening address
for the SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) entitled Nature’s Greatest Puzzles,
theorist Chris Quigg of Fermilab set the tone for two weeks’ worth of
exploration into ten of nature’s greatest physics questions. First, he
challenged attending scientists to describe how their current work
relates to one of the ten great questions—or is otherwise irresistibly
fascinating. Second, propose the eleventh puzzle.
“The spirit of those
opening remarks was partly that I’m uncomfortable with the idea of
‘great questions’,” Quigg said.
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