Newsroom

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.

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.

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.

More than a dozen Fermilab volunteers have helped design, test and finalize the Mechanical Ventilator Milano, a low-cost ventilator to help in the midst of device shortages caused by COVID-19.

The detector for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will collect massive amounts of data from star-born and terrestrial neutrinos. A single supernova burst could provide as much as 100 terabytes of data. A worldwide network of computers will provide the infrastructure and bandwidth to help store and analyze it. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, scientists are writing software to mine the data – to better understand supernovae and the evolution of our universe.

Hard to believe you can play pool with neutrinos, but certain neutrino events are closer to the game than you think. These special interactions involve a neutrino — famously elusive — striking a particle inside a nucleus like a billiard ball. MINERvA scientists study the dynamics of this subatomic ricochet to learn about the neutrino that triggered the collision. Now they have measured the probability of these quasielastic interactions using Fermilab’s medium-energy neutrino beam. Such measurements are important for current and future neutrino experiments.

On April 28, baby bison season officially began. The first calf of the year was born in the late morning, and mother and baby are doing well. Fermilab is expecting between 12 and 14 new calves this spring.

Scientists and engineers at Fermilab and Brookhaven are uniting with other organizations in the Open Science Grid to help fight COVID-19 by dedicating considerable computational power to researchers studying how they can help combat the virus-borne disease.

An ensemble of soprano, strings, piano and electronics gives voice to the mysterious neutrino in David Ibbett’s latest musical work as Fermilab guest composer. Mapping the waves of neutrino oscillation onto melodies played by the strings, Ibbett sonifies a neutrino phenomenon typically represented in abstract mathematical expressions. Hear the performance and Ibbett’s comments in this four-minute video.

Typically, Fermilab employee Keenan Newton spends his days managing Fermilab’s main content management platforms and his nights and weekends as a volunteer firefighter. Now he’s arranged his schedule to serve the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, volunteering his personal time to help people during the current pandemic and responding to hazardous situations while based at the State Emergency Operations Center in Springfield.