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From Futurism, Dec. 11, 2018: No matter how confident we are that it’s out there, dark matter continues to evade our brightest physicists. Now, yet another experiment designed to pick up on signs of dark matter’s presence has turned up nothing at all. Fermilab’s Dan Hooper comments on results from the COSINE-100 experiment.

From Berkeley Lab, Dec. 4, 2018: Key components of Berkeley Lab’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument are installed after months of planning, prep work. A team at Fermilab built the corrector, hexapod, and other top-end support structures. The structures are designed to align the lenses with an accuracy of tens of microns (millionths of a meter) – similar to the width of the thinnest human hair.

Physics books of 2018

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.

From Science News, Dec. 5, 2018: The COSINE-100 searched for particles using the same type of detector as another experiment, whose researchers said they had strong evidence that dark matter was interacting in their detector. COSINE-100 found no evidence of the evasive subatomic particles. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper comments on COSINE-100’s findings.

From Voyage Chicago, Dec. 6, 2018: Georgia Schwender, Fermilab Art Gallery curator, talks about creating art, curating a gallery, and founding the lab’s artist-in-residence program.

Top quark couture

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.

From Québec Science, Dec. 3, 2018: La mise en service d’immenses détecteurs au Fermilab, aux États-Unis, pourrait prochainement faire la lumière sur des particules aussi bizarres que prometteuses: les neutrinos.