Breaking the mould

摘要

AT THE Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, physicists are used to looking for signs of particle decay in the detectors. But as they were digitising archival photos of particle collisions, Matteo Volpi and Jean-Yves LeMeur came across a different kind of decay: mould. For 30 years, this slide was exposed to a mould that marched across the image, eating through the protein in the gelatin-based emulsion.