9 February

THE cult of the celebrity scientist has caused a marked rise in applications for physics degrees in Britain, with some leading universities reporting increases of up to per cent in what has been nicknamed the Brian Cox effect.

The theoretical expectation, based on Kobayashi’s and Maskawa’s very successful theory, is that the positively charged B+ will undergo this decay about as frequently as the negatively charged B– meson.

Twenty years after puzzling atmospheric ionization led to the discovery of cosmic rays, their investigation opened up particle physics. Now they’re providing a window on extragalactic astrophysics.

But even though protons and antiprotons no longer course through the six-kilometer loop of the Tevatron, life at Fermilab goes on.