Has cooking something to do with physics? Sure! There is a difference, if the meal is cooked in a clay pot or in a metal pot. In a clay pot it will take longer to heat the food up, but then the temperature will stay for a long time, even thought the oven is turned off. On the contrary the metal pot will heat up much faster, but as soon the pot is removed from the oven, the heat is nearly gone.

There is usually a defining moment, or event, that leads a person to science. For 10 year old Martin Rybar, it was the moment when he found the chemistry laboratory kit from his uncle in his parents' house. Curiosity has always been the main driving force in science – and Martin was no exception.

Eight-year-old Genevieve Steele was a little girl who knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was to play the harp. As soon as she first spotted one, while clog dancing at Sidmouth Folk Festival on England's south coast, she pretty much didn't let it out of her sight.

Year 2000, which was declared as the “year of physics” in Germany, was the very year, when Regina Kwee finished high school with the German Abitur in Berlin. She and a friend visited the particle physics exhibition “Trip to the Big Bang” and this may well have triggered her interest for this field. She was very much interested in physics, although she had an humanistic education with focus on ancient Greek and Latin.

Beneath our feet on this warm November night, we have realized the ancient dream of turning lead into gold.

There are many paths into science and one that might have played a key role for Takanori Kono could be LEGO bricks. Maybe it is the segmented approach learned from playing with those bricks that helped him later on tackle computer programming. It is easier to break down any problem into smaller chunks, seeing how it is put together as though it were made from basic building blocks.

Physicists are elderly men, wearing white lab coats and looking a bit like Einstein - that was the way most kids draw physicists before their visit to CERN. But, thanks to Valeria Perez Reale and her colleagues who participated in the 'Draw me a physicist' program, the way these kids see scientists changed forever. “I was happy to be interviewed and sketched by 8 years old from the Geneva and Pays de Gex area, who had never visited CERN before,” Valeria says. She adds, “It fills me with satisfaction to see young children interested in science and the pleasure when they learn new things that change the way they see their universe around them.”

“That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” we all remember Neil Armstrong saying while taking his first steps on the moon. As so many, Fred Luehring was glued to the television set that 21st of June, 1969, but to him this event meant much more than to most.

Maybe it snuck into her subconscious while she was wandering the geometrically perfect street plan of her native Euclid (yes, named after the famous 'Father of Geometry') near Cleveland, Ohio. Maybe it rubbed off on her as she discovered the intricacies of risk and probability while dealing smoky late night blackjack for her father's casino equipment hire business. Or maybe it was just pure chance. But one way or another, mathematics is in Kathy Copic's bones.

“I've always been interested in science, and questions about the universe and what makes it tick.” says Elvar Bjarkason. Like many physicists he began by being interested in general science, so still in primary school he liked mathematics, chemistry and physics, while learning about the structure of atoms. But that was just a start.

Another milestone has been passed in the long run of ATLAS toward new physics. On Monday August 9, 2010 ATLAS has recorded the first inverse picobarn (pb^-1) of 7 TeV collisions. The trend is good and we recently reached the 0.1 pb^-1 per day of integrated luminosity (meaning that we can now collect in ~10 days the amount of data we have collected over the last 4 months).

“In Sweden you can go out dancing in the summertime, where they play popular music but adapted for dancing,” says Stockholm native Bengt Lund-Jensen. Nine years ago, he decided to re-visit the dances of his undergrad days in pursuit of fitness, and now he spends his summers stepping out with other Scandinavians in the midnight twilight.

ATLAS is about to check one more particle off of its Standard Model (SM) checklist. Namely the top quark. This famous quark is perhaps one of the most complex of the SM particles.

“In a sense, life is never as you've foreseen it to be. This is also true for natural laws, and that's why I like to be a physicist so much,” Pascal Pralavorio says as he explains what makes discovery so interesting for him.

Going into his new position with Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand ('Wits' for short), Trevor Vickey sees his brief as “a sort of linear combination between a professorship and a Peace Corps assignment”. The tenure-track Senior Lecturer post will take him to a brand new continent, but, he says, he made the original application “on a whim” after five years as an ATLAS postdoc.

Do you hear that? The incessant typing? The coffee machines vending cup after cup? If you go to Building 40, or Building 32, Building 188, or to any one of the many graduate student offices around the world, you will hear the tap of key boards, the whir of disk drives, and even the occasional heated civil discussions with "elevated" voices.

For most particle physicists, memories of the dim and distant past when they couldn't yet use a computer are distinctly fuzzy. For Mahsana Ahsan, though, they're a little fresher: “I didn't have a chance to use computers during my studies due to lack of computer labs,” she explains. “When I first went to the US, I was only able to type an email very slowly.”

When the detector is running smoothly, neighbors in the ATLAS control room sometimes get conversational. A few days back I was on shift, quietly looking at plots on the monitor in front of me, trying to decide if one small sensor was misbehaving or not. “I have a question,” the shifter next to me said.

In the evening of Saturday May 15, we have reached a new peak luminosity record of 6 10²⁸ cm^-2s^-1

“I‘m very outgoing,”says Lucie de Nooij, without hesitation.“That may be a Dutch thing, but it‘s also very much me.”

Although he was a self-professed ‘bookworm’ up until his PhD days at Panjab University, Nitesh Soni somehow never expected to become a research scientist. “I was actually preparing for the Indian Administrative Services exam,” he recalls, an essential step on the path to becoming a Police Commissioner or Deputy Commissioner. “So I just joined particle physics research for a second option. But then after four months, my supervisor sent me to Japan, which changed my life.”

It took a little bit of time, but the wait was worth it. The LHC has successfully achieved its first physics run with "squeezed beams"!

ATLAS has been designed to detect rare events in high energy proton-proton collisions. ATLAS ultimate goal is to measure events as rare as one in several thousand billions, but we are modest (for the time being) waiting for the luminosity to rise.

Rachid Mazini grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. Although he’s now a big fan of rugged terrain, he spent his youth as a “city boy” with holidays on the Atlantic shoreline. It wasn’t until he started university in Marrakech that he began to explore the mountains – the Atlas range, in fact.

Now that the LHC has established colliding stable beams at a center of mass energy of 7 TeV, the next step to maximize its physics reach is to provide the most luminosity possible. As Leo posted, we need to increase the number of proton - proton collisions to make sure we have a chance of seeing the physics that we are looking for. The reason for that is because different p.hysics processes have different probabilities. These probabilities are referred to as cross-sections (in a vague reference to the particle's size). If one multiplies a cross section by a luminosity than what you get is a number of events.