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Monday, June 3
- Breakfast: oatmeal raisin pancakes
- Breakfast: Sausage, egg and cheese croissant
- Fermi burger
- Smart cuisine: country baked chicken
- Veal parmesan
- Classic club sandwich
- Buffalo chicken salad
- Chicken and sausage gumbo
- Texas-style chili
Wilson Hall Cafe menu
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Wednesday, June 5
Lunch
- Ham and gruyere crepes
- Garden herb salad with roasted-shallot vinaigrette
- Strawberry almond tart
Friday, June 7
Dinner
Closed
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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Upcoming farewell events for Pier Oddone
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Fermilab will host a farewell symposium for outgoing Director Pier Oddone on June 13.
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After eight years as the director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone will retire this summer. There are several upcoming farewell events planned for him, and all Fermilab employees and users are cordially invited to attend.
Symposium
Thursday, June 13, 4 to 5:45 p.m., Ramsey Auditorium.
Enjoy a series of fast-paced presentations that highlight Fermilab's many achievements and milestones during Pier's tenure as director.
Reception following symposium
Thursday, June 13, beginning at 6 p.m., Wilson Hall Atrium.
Join your fellow employees and users for refreshments, hors d'oeuvres and conversation.
Cake and ice cream with Pier on his last day
In July, date and time TBD (more details will be announced), Wilson Hall Atrium.
Say goodbye and enjoy celebratory cake and ice cream in the Atrium.
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Workshop meets June 4 as part of Scientific Computing Division's new FIFE project
As part of the new FabrIc for Frontier Experiments (FIFE) project, the Scientific Computing Division will hold a one-day workshop on June 4, 2013, at Fermilab in the CDF Big Room. The goal of the FIFE project is to provide common collaborative scientific-data processing solutions for Frontier experiments at Fermilab. To help the lab reach that goal, the workshop will provide Fermilab experiments and projects with an overview of the products available from SCD for offline computing, receive feedback from experiments about those products, and help define the vision for the FIFE project going forward. All interested experimenters are encouraged to attend. No registration is required. Please contact Michael Kirby for more information.
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Ant on the petal, jack in the pulpit
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An ant makes its way across the delicate petal of a common blackberry flower. Al Lilianstrom, CCD |
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A jack-in-the-pulpit grows in the woods by Site 38. Sue Quarto, FESS |
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Administration identifies R&D as critical to economic growth and job creation
From FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News, May 31, 2013
A three-page memorandum was sent to the heads of federal departments and agencies on May 29 from Sylvia Burwell, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, providing guidance for the development of the FY 2015 budget. This request will be sent to Congress early next year. Of interest to the research community is the following sentence in the second paragraph of the memorandum:
"The 2015 Budget should continue to build on the President's plan, by reducing spending on lower priority programs in order to create room for effective investments in areas critical to economic growth and job creation, including education, innovation, infrastructure, and research and development."
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Is it hot in here, or is it just me?
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| Acres of restored plant communities, like this area inside the Main Ring, can store tons of carbon. Photo: Fermilab
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Tracking carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the atmosphere has been a compelling job for scientists around the globe for the last 50 years. Since the Pliocene era, roughly 800,000 years ago, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has remained relatively stable, cycling between 200 and 300 parts per million. However, since the late 18th century, CO2 levels have risen sharply. In early May of this year, NOAA scientists at their observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, recorded a CO2 concentration of over 400 ppm for the first time in modern history. The increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution is largely due to human activities such as burning fossil fuels and mining carbonate rock. The increase is troubling because of the role CO2 plays in global climate change.
CO2 in the air cycles on an annual basis, rising during the winter months and declining during the summer because green plants are able to capture CO2 from the air and sequester it in plant tissue. During the growing season, green plants can store nearly half of the CO2 available in the atmosphere. While the 400-ppm level was a one-day measurement that will predictably decrease over the summer, it is just as predictable that next May's concentration will be even higher, as the annual CO2 level continues to rise.
Plants are able to sequester carbon through photosynthesis, which converts CO2 from the air into materials (such as leaves and wood) that plants need to survive. When plants die and decay, some of the carbon is released back into the atmosphere as CO2, but not all of it. The "standing army" of forests holds millions of tons of carbon, bound up in woody tissue, and prairies transport carbon into their root structure, where a portion is subsequently transferred to the surrounding soil. Fungi associated with tree roots also store large amounts of carbon gathered from plants. On average, forests are can store up to 4 metric tons of carbon per acre per year, and prairies can store roughly 1 metric ton per acre per year.
Fermilab's green plants, mostly in forests and restored prairie tracts, are capable of sequestering thousands of tons of carbon on a temporary basis each year. So in addition to preserving biodiversity, beauty and recreational opportunities, there is one more service that our natural areas provide for us!
—Rod Walton
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CERN Council updates European strategy for particle physics
From Interactions.org, May 30, 2013
Brussels/Geneva, 30 May 2013. At a special meeting hosted by the European Commission in Brussels today, the CERN Council formally adopted an update to the European strategy for particle physics. Since the original European strategy was put in place in 2006, particle physics has made considerable progress in elucidating the laws of nature at the most fundamental level. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun routine operation, producing its first major results, and the global particle physics landscape has evolved. The updated strategy takes these changes into account, charting a leading role for Europe in this increasingly globalised endeavour.
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