News

From 365 Days of Astronomy, Feb. 9, 2019: In this podcast, The Dark Energy Survey started in 2013 to map dark energy over 5000 square degrees of sky. Writer and poet Amy Catanzano visited Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory during the Dark Energy Survey. In this podcast, Amy discusses her work in quantum poetics, her experience with the Dark Energy Survey and shares some of her poetry.

From The Beacon-News, Feb. 10, 2019: Thousands of children and their parents put science on their radar Sunday as Fermilab held its annual open house event. For four hours, families were able to tour and explore the space Fermilab calls, “America’s premier particle physics and accelerator laboratory” and, according to staff, “show what we do and what’s possible here.”

If one wanted to follow the recipe for the universe, it would call for about 14 parts dark energy, 5 parts dark matter and 1 part visible matter. In a perpetually expanding cosmic landscape that reaches far beyond what even the most powerful telescopes can see, this might be hard to visualize. Physicists Katy Grimm and Katharine Leney found a solution for this: Use this recipe for the cosmos to bake a proportionally correct dark matter cake.

From University of Missouri – Kansas City’s University News, Feb. 6, 2019: Sánchez, a scientist at Iowa State University, is a part of Fermilab’s NOvA neutrino experiment and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. She also co-leads the ANNIE experiment at Fermilab.

Tenacious persistence

Fermilab’s Liz Sexton-Kennedy talks to Symmetry about her lifelong drive to learn and how it led to her current role as chief information officer for Fermilab. Jim Daley spoke to Sexton-Kennedy about her experiences in STEM, her career at Fermilab and a bit about herself.

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.