White deer
Photo: Courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory
  • About those white deer. Yes, they did exist (thanks to the previous landowner’s private menagerie, not radioactivity) but were thought to have died out due to inbreeding. Not so: One last beast was spotted this spring.
  • There’s a massive atrium-size Zen garden in a computer science building. Research can be stressful, man. But this retreat gives scientists a place to unwind.
  • Director Ang Lee’s designers modeled the Gammasphere in Hulk after the lab’s. Scientists use the real spectrometer to study forces inside atomic nuclei.
  • Paul Harvey tried to sneak into the lab. The conservative radio broadcaster was busted in the early ’50s trying to climb over a fence. To this day, no one knows for sure why he did it.