From Chicagoist, April 6, 2017: Fermilab isn’t just the site of major discoveries about the fabric of reality and a really, really big magnet. It’s also a lovely place in the Western burbs to enjoy a restored slice of the tallgrass prairie that once dominated Illinois.
In the news
From Wired, April 5, 2017: For some reason, more matter formed than antimatter just after the Big Bang, and physicists don’t know why. “It’s one of the very biggest mysteries in the universe,” says physicist Don Lincoln of Fermilab.
From Daily Herald, March 19, 2017: Hundreds of kids and their families watched in awe on March 19 as suburban science teachers presented fast-paced demonstrations about electricity during the 30th annual Wonders of Science show at Fermilab in Batavia.
From The Onion: April 1, 2017: CHICAGO — Two University of Chicago atomic physicists unveiled what they are calling their “most hilarious work to date”: an oversize novelty atom that measures “a ridiculously huge” 8.2 x 10-10 meters in diameter.
From Inverse, March 9, 2017: In the latest issue of the Justice League-Power Rangers crossover comic, superheroes gather at the mouth of what seems to be the LHC to discuss how to use it to jump across universes. A Vanderbilt University scientist and others believe LHC collisions could produce the Higgs singlet, which had the power to travel back and forth in time.
From WDCB 90.9 FM, March 17, 2017: A sculptor from Geneva is the latest artist to become Fermilab’s artist in residence. WDCB’s Brian O’Keefe visits Jim Jenkins to talk about the mass of a snowflake, bone jazz and the inspiration of Robert Wilson.
From the Chicago Tribune, March 13, 2017: One way Fermilab has been of benefit to the local community is the establishment of Aurora’s SciTech museum, which was opened by a Fermilab physicist in the 1980s.
From Physics World, March 7, 2017: This episode of the Physics World podcast describes a virtual reality tour of the MicroBooNE detector at Fermilab.
From Science, March 6, 2017: For more than a decade, multiple experiments have found an unexpected excess in the number of high-energy antielectrons, or positrons, in space. A team led by Fermilab’s Dan Hooper has shown that pulsars, not dark matter annihilation, can indeed produce most or all of the excess.
From Gizmodo, March 6, 2017: A new children’s book from the folks at Fermilab and SLAC takes a child (or maybe just an interested adult) along an adorably dorky rhyme-trip through some of the most important high-energy physics concepts.