If you know kids between the ages of 7 and 12, you know how hard it can be to get them excited about science from a textbook. Children love to be wowed and to experience physical phenomena with eyes wide and jaws dropped. That’s the thinking behind Fermilab’s annual Wonders of Science show, which will take place on Sunday, March 10, at 1 p.m. The show, organized and performed by award-winning high school teachers, is celebrating its 32nd year at Fermilab. Tickets are $5.00 per person.
The U.S. Department of Energy has approved the scope, cost and schedule for the U.S. LHC Accelerator Upgrade Project and has given the first approval for the purchase of materials. This project brings together scientists, engineers and technicians from national laboratories — such as Fermilab, Brookhaven, Berkeley, SLAC and Jefferson labs — to develop two cutting-edge technologies to advance the future of both the Large Hadron Collider and broader collider research.
A Chicago native, Drena Johnson was born and raised about an hour outside of Fermilab, on the west side of Chicago. Although her knowledge of Fermilab was limited prior to working here, she now uses her platform to bring information about the lab to her peers and her community.
For The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2019: Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Fermilab scientist Josh Frieman is quoted in this article.
Given the popularity of our first article about physics concepts with deceptively common names, Symmetry is back with 10 more seemingly normal words that mean something different in a science context. Some of this science sounds awfully familiar.
From Live Science, Feb. 21, 2019: This primer on neutrinos calls out the search for sterile neutrinos and a recent result from the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment.
Fermilab engineer Ryan Rivera receives the consortium’s Young Alumni Leadership Award. GEM’s mission is to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. A GEM alumnus, Rivera is recognized for his influence, commitment and passion in creating better opportunities for underrepresented groups in STEM-related fields.
From CNN, Feb. 20, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln celebrates the 150th anniversary of the invention of the periodic table of elements, which epitomizes our modern understanding of chemistry. Displayed on the wall of chemistry classrooms, it is a vast chart of over 100 elements — the chemical building blocks of every substance you’ve ever seen.
From This Week in Science, Feb. 20, 2019:
This podcast features Antonella Palmese, a postdoctoral research associate at Fermilab and a member of the Dark Energy Survey, which recently completed its six-year observation of a section of the southern sky.
One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists have recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. Their piece, a bright blue and white sculpture of tracks of microscopic bubbles in a bubble chamber, was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. To find the perfect bubble chamber image to recreate, they scrolled through hundreds of these photographs in the archive at Fermilab.