After more than a year of repairs, the Large Hadron Collider located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland is back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

For 39 years, it stood as the workhorse for high-energy and heavy-ion physics, a service record of accomplishment that is unrivaled. On November 6, 2009, nearly 200 Laboratory and retired Laboratory staff and well-wishers braved the rain and fog to pay final tribute and farewell to the Bevatron.

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole’s newly published biography of the “uncle of the atom bomb,” as Frank Oppenheimer called himself, recounts the touching and sometimes tortuous relationship between Frank, Ernest Lawrence, and other physicists as they struggled to find a way to survive a nuclear age. Oppenheimer’s solution was to found an extraordinary science museum, the Exploratorium.

Berkeley Lab’s Oct. 26 Science at the Theater event, “Dark Secrets: What Science Tells Us About the Hidden Universe,” was a smash hit: more than 600 people packed the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Host John Fowler, health and science editor for KTVU Channel 2, moderated a panel of astrophysicists and cosmologists that included Saul Perlmutter, David Schlegel, and Alexie Leauthaud.

Three-quarters of the Universe is dark energy, but nobody knows what it is. Is it an unknown form of energy that fills space, or an illusion caused by extra dimensions of space? Or is it just a flaw in Einstein’s theory of gravity? Proven techniques for investigating these questions are being refined, while new techniques are beginning to be applied to one of the most pressing problems in 21st-century physics. Part 1 discusses supernovae as standard candles.

Baryon acoustic oscillations provides a “standard ruler” for the Universe, a way to measure the details of dark energy.

Gravitational lensing, which depends on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, directly tests its ability to predict the growth of large-scale structure.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed the world’s first acoustic hyperlens, a device that provides an eightfold boost in the magnification power of ultrasound, underwater sonar and other sound-based imaging technologies.