Fermilab Today

	Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Subscribe \| Contact Us \| Archive \| Classifieds \| Guidelines \| Help	Search

Calendar

Have a safe day!

Wednesday, March 6

10 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Webcast of Higgs boson updates, Moriond conference

3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Marcello Mannelli, CERN
Title: New Detector Technologies for the LHC Experiments

Thursday, March 7

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: Martin Bauer
Title: The Flavor Problem in Strongly Coupled Theories

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.

Ongoing and upcoming conferences at Fermilab

Campaigns

Take Five

Weather

Light snow
32°/15°

Extended forecast
Weather at Fermilab

Current Security Status

Secon Level 3

Current Flag Status

Flags at half staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, March 6

- Breakfast: breakfast strata
- Harvest moon vegetable soup
- Monte Cristo
- Baja chicken enchilada casserole
- Smart cuisine: ancho chili barbecue beef
- Italian antipasto sandwich
- Assorted calzones
- Szechuan green beans with chicken

Wilson Hall Cafe Menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, March 6
Lunch
- Grilled lemongrass beef and noodle salad
- Almond cake

Friday, March 8
Dinner
- Pasta carbonara
- Stuffed filet of sole with crab
- Sautéed spinach
- Pecan rum cake

Chez Leon Menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

Gamma cameras see through dense tissue

Gamma rays, valued by astrophysicists for conveying information about phenomena in space, are also becoming valued by doctors for their ability to uncover cancer. Photo: Gamma Medica, Inc.

As the most energetic form of light, gamma rays are great for revealing astrophysical phenomena such as supermassive black holes and merging neutron stars.

They’re also proving excellent for detecting early stages of cancer.

“The search for the most violent events in the universe has led to the development of the most sensitive gamma-ray detectors,” says Gunnar Maehlum, a former particle physics researcher who is now general manager at Gamma Medica-Ideas, a company that designs integrated circuits for radiation detection. “Due to their superior performance, they are now being introduced into medical diagnostic equipment.”

For tumors hidden within dense tissue, traditional screening sometimes isn’t detailed enough to reveal the cancer. This is especially true in the case of breast cancer. For the 30 percent of women with dense breast tissue, traditional X-ray mammography doesn’t work well because, in an X-ray image, dense tissue appears opaque and white, just like a tumor.

Using detectors and integrated circuits designed for particle-physics experiments, a group of researchers in particle physics, nuclear medicine, medical physics and astronomy developed a compact semiconductor-based imager with high spatial resolution that reveals tumors even within dense tissue.

These gamma-ray mammography cameras use cadmium-zinc-telluride detectors and are highly accurate, says Michael K. O’Connor, a professor of radiologic physics at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

—Kelen Tuttle

From WDRS

Unlocking the mysteries of the Family Medical Leave Act

When you or a loved one experiences a serious health condition that requires you to take time off from work, the stress from worrying about your job may add to an already difficult situation.

Did you know there is a federal law called Family Medical Leave Act that aids employees in these situations?

On Tuesday, March 12, noon – 1 p.m. in Wilson Hall conference room One West, Jennifer Gondorchin from the Fermilab Benefits Department will present an overview of FMLA and how it relates to the benefits offered at Fermilab. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. This seminar is sponsored by the Fermilab Disability Awareness Group and the Fermilab Benefits Department.

Photo of the Day

In graceful pursuit

A coyote goes hunting in the tall grass near Casey's Pond. Photo: Marty Murphy, AD

In the News

Chasing the Higgs Boson

From The New York Times, March 5, 2013

MEYRIN, Switzerland —Vivek Sharma missed his daughter.

A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson —the long-sought “God particle.”

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature’s clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist — to know something that nobody else has ever known — was happening to someone else.

From ESH&Q

Have you thanked your SSO lately? (Do you know who your SSO is?)

Nancy Grossman

Nancy Grossman, head of the Environmental Safety, Health and Quality Services Section, wrote this column.

Senior safety officers (SSOs) are an ESH&Q director's eyes and ears in the field. They are the key to enabling you to do your work with a minimal amount of safety overhead. They are constantly on the lookout for how to improve programs so we can do more science by reducing the number of unwanted safety-related incidents at the laboratory and by implementing more streamlined processes. So how does that work? Believe me, it is not easy with such a diverse culture and workforce.

Talk to the SSO if you have an issue or suggestion on how to improve something. SSOs bring your ideas to our monthly meetings, and together we figure out a path forward that will work for the lab. Our discussions can get quite heated at times, but that is just because a smart, passionate group of people is trying to do what is best for the lab.

This group reviews all injuries and near misses, applying Human Performance Improvement, better known as HPI. During these incident reviews we try to figure out what went wrong and how we might change lab processes to mitigate the consequences, or, better yet, to prevent it from it occurring again. Near misses are great opportunities that we need to take advantage of. Typically when we hear about a near miss, we make program improvements that address many areas at the lab. If you experience a near miss or see one, share it with your SSO so he or she can make sure that next time, someone won't get hurt.

Examples of the laboratorywide improvements that came from our SSOs are the Take 5 program, the human performance improvement initiative and, more recently, a labwide hazard analysis database.

Please share your environment, safety and health issues and ideas for improvement with your SSO and supervisor so we can work to improve our ability to do science safely and effectively. And if you don't know who your SSO is, ask your supervisor!

Safety Update