From Live Science, Feb. 5, 2019: This article dives deep into the little teensy tiny particles that are fundamental building blocks of matter. As far as scientists can tell, quarks themselves are not made of anything smaller. That may change in the future as we learn more, but it’s good enough for now.
In the news
From Listverse, Feb. 5, 2019: This listicle mentions Fermilab scientist Melissa Franklin as part of the Fermilab team that discovered the top quark.
From Slate, Jan. 31, 2019: In science, lack of discovery can be just as instructive as discovery. Finding out that there are no particles where we had hoped tells us about the distance between human imagination and the real world. It can operate as a motivation to expand our vision of what the real world is like at scales that are totally unintuitive.
From IEEE Spectrum, Jan. 30, 2019: If realized, the Future Circular Collider will produce magnetic fields nearly twice as strong as the LHC and accelerate particles to unprecedented energies of 100 teraelectron volts, compared to the Large Hadron Collider’s energies of 13 TeV. Whereas the magnetic system at the LHC can achieve strengths of 8.3 teslas, the FCC system would be able to achieve 16 T.
From Chicago Tribune, Jan. 30, 2019: Think of it as a Physics Party. A big one. The popular Fermilab Family Open House is back with a bang from 1 to 5 p.m. Feb. 10 at Fermilab. The lab wants visitors to gain a better understanding of all the exciting things happening at Fermilab and a general appreciation for STEM fields and research.
From Scientific American, Jan. 30, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmonese weighs in on a new method of determining the Hubble constant. The method uses data taken from the Fermilab-hosted Dark Energy Survey.
From Nature Reviews Physics, Jan. 28, 2019: The Dark Energy Survey completed its six-year-mission to map more than 300 million distant galaxies; however, an equally arduous task — analyzing the acquired 50 terabytes of data with a view to understanding the expansion of the universe — is just beginning.
From APS’s Physics, Jan. 29, 2019: On Jan. 9, a handful of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey — one of the most ambitious attempts to probe the dynamics of the universe’s expansion — headed to the control room of Chile’s Blanco Telescope. For one last time, they opened the white telescope’s dome. From their perch overlooking the red Andean Mountains, they set up for a night of observing the southern sky.
From The Beacon-News, Jan. 24, 2019: Isaac Facio, a textiles specialist at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been selected as Fermilab’s artist-in-residence for 2019. Facio draws on his background in textiles engineering and conservation to approach questions about the universe.
From Kane County Chronicle, Jan. 24, 2019: Families are invited to spend an afternoon learning about science through hands-on activities at Fermilab’s annual open house from 1 to 5 p.m. on Feb. 10.