Symmetry

A new telescope will take a sequence of snapshots with the world’s largest digital camera, covering the entire visible night sky every few days — and repeating the process for an entire decade. What’s the best way to rapidly and automatically identify and categorize all of the stars, galaxies and other objects captured in these images? Data scientists trained have computers to pick out useful information from these hi-res snapshots of the universe.

A pair of 1964 films detailing the construction of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center were recently remastered and are now available for viewing on YouTube. The films provide a fascinating look back at the origins of SLAC and the history of particle physics in the United States. At the time of the production, SLAC was the largest civilian basic science project ever undertaken in the United States.

If you want to visit the Pasner family farm, you’ll need a truck with four-wheel drive. You’ll need to traverse 4 miles of bumpy dirt road deep into the countryside of Penn Valley, California. But once you arrive, you’ll be greeted by fields of organic onions and garlic, nestled between rolling grassy hills speckled with oak trees. For physicist Jake Pasner, this will always be home.

Fermilab’s Inclusivity Journal Club seeks answers to difficult social questions in science. A typical meeting includes physicists and postdoctoral researchers as well as non-science staff; students are also welcome to attend. Members read and discuss reports and peer-reviewed papers that address issues such as sexual harassment, implicit bias and best practices for expanding inclusivity.

CERN inspired famous Dutch fashion artist Iris van Herpen to create her Magnetic Motion collection.

‘Tis the season for friends, family and funny physics fill-ins. Here at Symmetry, we’ve taken a page from Mad Libs, those short stories designed to trick you into learning parts of speech, and created some science-themed Lab Libs (to trick you into learning science). Simply fill in the blanks to create original science stories.

REFUGES, started by physicist Tino Nyawelo, aims to give refugees and other underrepresented groups the tools to succeed in STEM. Although the program is focused on increasing diversity in STEM disciplines, the overall goal is to address the academic and cultural difficulties that refugee youth face in Utah.

Symmetry writer Mike Perricone presents his annual compilation of new popular science books related to particle physics and astrophysics. The array that Symmetry readers might have encountered in 2018 ranges from the philosophical to the whimsical.

The mentorship of a scientist on the CMS experiment meant everything to Evan Coleman, a former physics undergraduate at Brown University. What do you give a physicist who helped discover a fundamental particle and jump-started your science career? Something individual, artistic and science-themed.

A proton describes its final moments in the Large Hadron Collider. During its second run, between 2015 and 2018, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN collided about 16 million billion particle pairs. This 3-minute animation is the story of one of them.