Best of Last Week – World record for tabletop accelerator, mystery of Earth's water source and roller coaster strokes
It was a good week for physics as one team of researchers set a world record for a compact 'tabletop' particle accelerator—they used one of the most powerful lasers in existence to accelerate subatomic particles to the highest energies ever recorded for such a device, setting a new benchmark for what can be accomplished on them. Meanwhile, a team of physicists attempted to explain why some composite subatomic structures created at the Large Hadron Collider fell apart in unexpected ways during collisions, by reconsidering the math behind the underlying physics. Also, another team of researchers found a way to use real data rather than theory to measure the cosmos—they used data from astronomical surveys to measure a standard distance, suggesting that some current methods for measuring distance in the universe may be more complicated than they need to be.