Wednesday, April 23, 2014
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Have a safe day!

Wednesday, April 23

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

4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Greg Engel, University of Chicago
Title: Probing Design Principles of Energy Transfer in Photosynthetic and Biomimetic Systems

Thursday, April 24

11 a.m.
Academic Lecture Series - One West
Speaker: Ed Kearns, Boston University
Title: Natural Neutrinos

2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: James Unwin, Notre Dame University
Title: High-Scale Supersymmetry and F-Theory GUTs

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

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55°/38°

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Secon Level 3

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Flags at full staff

Wilson Hall Cafe

Wednesday, April 23

- Breakfast: breakfast pizza
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Gyros
- Smart cuisine: baked pork chops
- Chicken cacciatore
- California turkey wrap
- Chicken carbonara
- Three-bean overland soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted calzones

Wilson Hall Cafe menu

Chez Leon

Wednesday, April 23
Lunch
- Grilled teriyaki shrimp kebobs
- Couscous
- Sugar snap peas
- Coconut flan

Friday, April 25
Dinner
- Mandarin orange and red onion salad
- Grilled mahi mahi with avocado and tomatillo salsa
- Thai rice pilaf
- Grilled asparagus
- Coconut cake

Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.

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In Brief

Administrative Professionals Day celebration - today

Fermilab will celebrate the contributions of its administrative professionals today at Kuhn Barn. A buffet lunch will be served between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. All administrative employees are invited to attend.

Feature

New addition to Fermilab's bison herd arrives

This spring's first bison baby was born on April 20. Photo: Reidar Hahn

Spring has finally arrived, and with it, the newest addition to the Fermilab community.

On Sunday, April 20, Fermilab welcomed the first new calf of the year to its herd of American bison, commonly known as buffalo. At least a dozen more calves are expected this spring.

View more photos of the new calf.

Everybody, especially families with small children, is welcome to come to the pasture where the young buffalo run around under the watchful eyes of "mom and dad bison."

Visitors can enter the Fermilab site through the Pine Street entrance in Batavia or the Batavia Road entrance in Warrenville. Admission is free, but you will need a valid photo ID to enter the site. Summer hours are from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week.

To learn more about Fermilab's bison, please visit our website on the bison herd.

Photos of the Day

Prairie burns for restoration

The Fermilab prairie burn season is nearly over. Here, a controlled prairie burn is conducted on a hillside. Fermilab's trained crew always checks weather conditions and takes every precaution before conducting a burn. Prairie burns help get rid of invasive plants and are essential to restoring the natural habitat. Photo: Dave Shemanske, FESS
This burn took place near Lab 6. Photo: Dave Shemanske, FESS
Fermilab Today reader Gordon Garcia of Bartlett, Ill., took this photo of a controlled burn at the prairie east of the Pine Street entrance to Fermilab. The Fermilab Roads and Grounds crew uses small vehicles to transport equipment and monitor prairie burns. Photo: Gordon Garcia
In Brief

STEM Career Expo for high school students - today

Today from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the Wilson Hall atrium, Fermilab will offer high school students a valuable opportunity to meet with scientists, engineers and research professionals at the annual STEM Career Expo.

The expo will put students face to face with people who work at the kinds of jobs students will apply for in the coming years.

The event is free and open to all high school students. The collaborative event is organized by the Fermilab Education Office and educators and career specialists from Kane and DuPage county schools. Sponsors include Fermilab Friends for Science Education, Batavia High School and Geneva Community High School.

In the News

Could pulsars explain the positron excess?

From Physics World, April 15, 2014

Invoking dark matter as a means to explain the excess of positrons observed last year by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) experiment might not be necessary, according to physicists in Europe. Instead, they say, the entire dataset can be explained purely in terms of known astrophysical processes such as pulsars and cosmic rays.

Read more

From the Scientific Computing Division

Open Science Grid at Fermilab

Chander Sehgal

Chander Sehgal, OSG project manager, wrote this column.

The Open Science Grid is a sharing ecosystem in computing for researchers in nearly all fields of science. OSG members connect their resources both to perform computing for their own experiments and to make available what they do not use at that time to other OSG members.

The collective nature of OSG makes science advances possible on a global scale. Many experiments have collaborators who are geographically scattered, and OSG allows them to connect their distributed computing resources to the "grid," effectively using a common set of tools for that experiment.

Also, communities are often able to afford resources only for their average workloads, and that can create bottlenecks during peak periods such as during the run-up to summer conferences. With the sharing power of OSG, experiments can "borrow" computing opportunistically from other OSG partners to accomplish their work in time frames that would otherwise be impossible.

Over the last decade, Fermilab has been a vital partner in using and advancing OSG. CDF and DZero have used computing systems at Fermilab, such as FermiGrid, based on grid interfaces. CMS took it to the next level by building and operating the U.S. Tier 1 center, which serves as the U.S. hub for data and contributes a big share of the worldwide computing for CMS. And more recently, NOvA has started using OSG sites across the United States to run physics simulations.

Over the years, many Scientific Computing Division staff members have been key contributors to the advancement of OSG. Currently, Lothar Bauerdick serves as the executive director for the project, which executes the work program using staff from 11 U.S. institutions, and Ruth Pordes serves as the chair of the OSG Council, which represents the stakeholder community. In addition, Fermilab provides leadership in project management, user support and security for the OSG.

The 2014 OSG all-hands meeting at SLAC has just concluded. We reviewed the recent work of the project and learned about the use cases and experiences of many stakeholders scattered around the globe. This is an exciting period for OSG as we look to evolve and re-shape our platforms and services to continue to be an effective framework for distributed high-throughput computing for the next decade. The roots of OSG are in high-energy physics, but many non-physics researches now use it to study topics such as brain concussions and the human immune response to tuberculosis.

We are at an equally exciting time at Fermilab as we work with the Intensity Frontier experiments to enable their effective use of OSG and the distributed computing resources provided by Fermilab and other collaborators across the United States. The NOvA, MicroBooNE and LBNE collaborations are commissioning production activities on OSG now. We have a lot of hard work ahead as we build a distributed computing environment for the Intensity Frontier experiments, and I am confident in the future benefits for our researchers.

Safety Update

ESH&Q weekly report, April 22

This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains two incidents.

An employee was struck in the face when a strong wind pushed on the door she was opening. She received first-aid treatment.

An employee hurt his right wrist and hand when his hand was caught in a door. Cold compresses and elevation were recommended.

Find the full report here.

Announcements

Today's New Announcements

Laboratory Directed Research and Development information session - today and April 29

National Day of Prayer Observance - May 1

Wilson Street entrance closed starting May 5

Pre-retirement planning Lunch and Learn - today and May 7

Earth Week Fair - April 24

Zumba Fitness registration due April 24

Fermilab Lecture Series: Nigel Lockyer gives talk on April 25

Three-on-three basketball tourney - starts May 1

Change in tax practice may affect some visitors

Fermilab Time and Labor URLs changing

On sale now: Fermilab Natural Areas hats and shirts

A Smart Cuisine purchase earns you 10 bonus points

2014 Fermilab Golf League season is upon us

Wednesday Walkers

Scottish country dancing meets Tuesday evenings at Kuhn Barn

International folk dancing meets Thursday evenings at Kuhn Barn

Indoor soccer