Have a safe day!
Monday, Sept. 17
2:30 p.m.
Particle Astrophysics Seminar - One West
Speaker: Alex Geringer-Sameth, Brown University
Title: Results of Dark Matter Searches in Dwarf Galaxies with Fermi
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ALL EXPERIMENTERS' MEETING THIS WEEK
Tuesday, Sept. 18
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
Upcoming conferences |
Monday, Sept. 17
- Breakfast: banana nut multi-grain pancakes
- Bourbon Street gumbo
- The Fermi Burger
- Veal parmesan
- Smart cuisine: country baked chicken
- Classic club sandwich
- Meatball pizza
- Cantonese sweet and sour chicken
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu
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Wednesday, Sept. 19
Lunch
- Chicken and artichoke calzone
- Salad
- Chocolate fondue
Friday, Sept. 21
Dinner
- Salad with cranberries, walnuts and blue cheese
- Pan-roasted beef tenderloin with stroganoff sauce
- Barley risotto
- Sautéed baby zucchini
- Cocoa cappuccino mousse
Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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World's most powerful digital camera opens eye, records first images in hunt for dark energy
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121007235212im_/http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images12/decam-47-tucanae-s.jpg) |
Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, which lies about 17,000 light years from Earth. Photo: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration
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Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.
That light may hold within it the answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics – why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
Scientists in the international Dark Energy Survey collaboration announced this week that the Dark Energy Camera, the product of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers and technicians on three continents, has achieved first light. The first pictures of the southern sky were taken by the 570-megapixel camera on Sept. 12.
"The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the Cosmic Frontier," said James Siegrist, DOE associate director of science for high-energy physics. "The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of dark energy and what it means for the universe."
The Dark Energy Camera was constructed at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which is the southern branch of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). With this device, roughly the size of a phone booth, astronomers and physicists will probe the mystery of dark energy, the force they believe is causing the universe to expand faster and faster.
"The Dark Energy Survey will help us understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing due to gravity," said Brenna Flaugher, project manager and scientist at Fermilab. "It is extremely satisfying to see the efforts of all the people involved in this project finally come together."
Read more
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Evidence for dark energy stacks up, says team
From TG Daily, Sept. 12, 2012
Dark energy is real, say scientists who claim they've validated the disputed 2003 research that was seen as the first clear evidence for its existence.
The astronomers, from the University of Portsmouth and LMU University Munich, say there's a 99.996 percent chance that the strange substance thought to be speeding up the expansion of the universe is really there.
"Dark energy is one of the great scientific mysteries of our time, so it isn't surprising that so many researchers question its existence," says Professor Bob Nichol, a member of the Portsmouth team.
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Who invented the Higgs boson?
From Science, Sept. 14, 2012
Now that the Higgs Boson—or something much like it—is in the bag, the question on many people's minds is who gets the Nobel Prize for the discovery.
If you go by the pop history, the answer is obvious. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a mild-mannered theorist from the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, dreamed up the particle to explain the origins of mass. He completed physicists' standard model of fundamental particles and forces. Experimenters working with the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Switzerland, have now seen that particle (Science, 13 July, p. 141). So Higgs gets the glory.
Only that's not exactly what happened. In fact, theorists say, Higgs made a fairly narrow and esoteric advance in mathematical physics. Several other physicists made the same advance at the same time. Their intellectual leap was essential to the development of the standard model, perhaps the most elaborate and precise theory in all of science. But their papers didn't even mention the most important problem their work helped to solve. Other scientists did that later—but their contribution (which won Nobel laurels in 1979) still doesn't explain the origins of all mass.
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Conserving water for the planet
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121007235212im_/http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images12/low-flow-faucet-s.jpg) |
Low-flow, motion-sensing faucets like this one in Wilson Hall save hundreds of gallons of water each year. Photo: Rod Walton |
The water level in Lake Michigan is down a foot, the Colorado River peters out before it even reaches the Gulf of California, and the supply of clean drinking water around the world is shrinking, even as population levels increase. Many ecologists consider the lack of drinking water the number one future global environmental and public health problem. In addition to the problem of increased water pollution, warmer climate reduces the amount of liquid water on the planet, further decreasing the available amount of this critical resource. Since getting additional water is costly and/or environmentally damaging, an important strategy for addressing this problem is water conservation.
In the U.S., the average daily consumption of water that is safe to drink is 69 gallons per person. Here at Fermilab, we purchase almost all of our drinking water from the city of Warrenville, and we currently use roughly 30 gallons per person per day. Since 2007, Fermilab has reduced our consumption of drinking water by over 50 percent, largely by aggressively finding and repairing leaks in our water distribution system. An additional advantage at Fermilab is that we use very little drinking water for industrial processes. Almost all process water is drawn from surface water, including fire protection and landscape water.
Part of our water-saving strategy is to invest in faucets and toilets that use less water. Of the 69 gallons per person used in the U.S., 41 gallons come from faucets, showerheads and toilets. As part of our High-Performance and Sustainable Buildings program, Fermilab is installing faucets that have maximum flows of 0.5 gallons per minute and toilets that use much less water per flush in new buildings. The new toilets will replace some existing ones.
These practices can be applied at home as well. Installing water-saving faucet fixtures and showerheads, such as the EPA's WaterSense label products, can save up to 30 percent of water use over older fixtures. You can save an equal amount of water by installing water-saving toilets, which have low flush volumes, dual-flush toilets or, for the ultimate in savings, a composting toilet that uses zero water!
—Rod Walton
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Company contracted to construct NOvA Near Detector Hall earns Shining Star Award
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121007235212im_/http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images12/kiewit-star-12-0257-08D.hr-s.jpg) |
Kiewit Infrastructure Co. earned a Shining Star Award for having the highest safety score in their district for outstanding safety performance. The crew celebrated at the change of shifts Friday morning with a celebratory breakfast at their construction site. Kiewit is the subcontractor building the NOvA Near Detector Hall adjacent to the existing NuMI tunnel. Photo: Cindy Arnold
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