By John Timmer, Ars Technica

Two of the general purpose detectors at the LHC, ATLAS and CMS, tend to keep a high profile, as they’re designed to be able to spot anything that comes out of the collisions — the Higgs, dark matter, or something even more exotic. LHCb is quite a bit more specialized, as it is designed specifically to track those collisions that include a particle that contains a bottom quark (generically, these particles are called B mesons). In doing so, it’s meant to provide the most precise test of a number of predictions made by the Standard Model; should the test show...

When U.S. forces moved into Afghanistan in 2001, there was little, if any, infrastructure to support and house U.S. troops. The military needed someone to do everything from quartering troops to rebuilding airfields. The solution was a contract called the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LogCap, a type of umbrella contract the Army had been using to support its military bases overseas.

In late 2001, the Army, after a competition, awarded LogCap III, the newest (hence, “III”) comprehensive base-services contract, to KBR, which already had substantial experience with such work. Under Log...