If you live in the Chicago suburbs and have ever taken a walk on the Fermilab hike-and-bike trail along Batavia Road, you’ve probably noticed large trees with long, slender bean pods, which — even after they fall to the ground — are ignored by wildlife. Not that long ago, mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the Fermilab grounds and feasted on these bean pods, along with the fruit of two additional species that still can be found growing on site.

From Industrial Equipment News, May 15, 2020: It’s an open-source ventilator made with off-the-shelf parts designed by the particle physics community.

From Sanford Underground Research Facility, May 19, 2020: The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, will be tuned to see neutrinos streaming from a nearby supernova. Such neutrino interactions could give researchers insight into one of the explosive processes that formed the elements in our solar system and our planet.

From the University of Bern, May 2020: The University of Bern and Fermilab partner on three neutrino projects aimed at a thorough study of some postulated properties of the ghostly particle: MicroBooNE, SBND and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, the latter to be considered the world’s ultimate neutrino observatory.

As with all first responders across the nation, the Fermilab Fire Department stands ready to act should they be called upon to help with a COVID-19 incident in the areas surrounding the suburban Illinois laboratory.

From the Chicago Quantum Exchange, May 18, 2020: Farah Fahim is the deputy head of quantum science at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. For much of her career, she developed low-noise, high-speed reconfigurable pixel detectors for high-energy physics and photon science. She recently pivoted to control and readout electronics for quantum systems, and says, “The future is bright.”

Physicist Cristiano Galbiati shifted focus from the search for dark matter to the shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients. The collaboration he began created an easy-to-manufacture ventilator in less than two months.

Experimentalists and theorists search for Higgs bosons escaping as dark matter.

From APS Physics, May 14, 2020: Particle physicists are faced with a growing list of anomalies — experimental results that conflict with the Standard Model but fail to overturn it for lack of sufficient evidence. These include the muon anomaly, which scientists on Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment are studying. Fermilab scientist Chris Polly is featured in this article.

From Quanta Magazine, May 6, 2020: Two ways of approximating the ultracomplicated math that governs quark particles have recently come into conflict, leaving physicists unsure what their decades-old theory predicts. Fermilab scientists Andreas Kronfeld and Chris Polly weigh in.