News

For The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2019: Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Fermilab scientist Josh Frieman is quoted in this article.

Given the popularity of our first article about physics concepts with deceptively common names, Symmetry is back with 10 more seemingly normal words that mean something different in a science context. Some of this science sounds awfully familiar.

From Live Science, Feb. 21, 2019: This primer on neutrinos calls out the search for sterile neutrinos and a recent result from the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment.

Research has shown that the presence of trees and woody vegetation in grasslands can significantly reduce the area occupied by grassland birds. To maximize usable habitat in the Eola grasslands at Fermilab, the first step is to clear the open fields of woody vegetation and trees. FNA received this grant to support the first phase of the project and hire a contractor to remove trees from this area.

Fermilab engineer Ryan Rivera receives the consortium’s Young Alumni Leadership Award. GEM’s mission is to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. A GEM alumnus, Rivera is recognized for his influence, commitment and passion in creating better opportunities for underrepresented groups in STEM-related fields.

From CNN, Feb. 20, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln celebrates the 150th anniversary of the invention of the periodic table of elements, which epitomizes our modern understanding of chemistry. Displayed on the wall of chemistry classrooms, it is a vast chart of over 100 elements — the chemical building blocks of every substance you’ve ever seen.

From This Week in Science, Feb. 20, 2019:
This podcast features Antonella Palmese, a postdoctoral research associate at Fermilab and a member of the Dark Energy Survey, which recently completed its six-year observation of a section of the southern sky.

One sprinkle of sand at a time, two artists have recreated the moment a particle passed through a detector 30 years earlier. Their piece, a bright blue and white sculpture of tracks of microscopic bubbles in a bubble chamber, was inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the sand mandala. To find the perfect bubble chamber image to recreate, they scrolled through hundreds of these photographs in the archive at Fermilab.

From Big Picture Science, Feb. 18, 2019: Fermilab scientist Anne Schukraft is interviewed in this podcast episode about ghostly particles called neutrinos — intriguing partly because they came decades before we had the means to prove their existence.