"The technology is really blossoming right now," she said. "When Fermilab became involved in videoconferencing in the early 1990s, there were three conference rooms. Now we are up to about 26." In addition to the official conference rooms, individuals can also take advantage of the Internet to wire their own offices for videoconferences. Shifting some conferences from phone to Internet technology is not only more convenient for some users, but it is also beneficial to the lab. "Before, the lab could have dial-up circuit phone bills that were $14,000 per month, so the new technology is really saving us money," Cisko explained.

Today, videoconferencing is important to Fermilab, especially because of the lab's international community. More videoconferences are including multiple sites, including remote locations in many different countries, increasing the need for top of the line equipment. "The most important aspect of a videoconference is having good audio, especially in our community, where English is not everybody's first language," explained Cisko.

In addition to single-handedly coordinating Fermilab's videoconferencing, Cisko is the Chair of the Remote Collaboration Working Group, which includes many DOE lab members involved in facilitating collaboration. "There is a lot of focus on consistency of technology and centralization of services right now," Cisko said. "The technology is becoming easier to use, and people's comfort levels are increasing." Although Cisko believes that "it is hard to say where the new tools will take us," she will be there to guide Fermilab through the future of videoconferencing.
—Elizabeth Wade

"While developing computing models for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, we realized that vital monitoring information was missing," explained Caltech's Iosif Legrand, MonALISA's chief architect. "We didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so we built a framework that collects and synthesizes data from many existing monitoring tools and built new tools only where needed."
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ESA's X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has for the first time allowed scientists to study in detail the formation history of galaxy clusters, not only with single arbitrarily selected objects, but with a complete representative sample of clusters.

Knowing how these massive objects formed is a key to understanding the past and future of the Universe.

Scientists currently base their well-founded picture of cosmic evolution on a model of structure formation where small structures form first and these then make up larger astronomical objects.

Galaxy clusters are the largest and most recently formed objects in the known Universe, and they have many properties that make them great astrophysical 'laboratories'. For example, they are important witnesses of the structure formation process and important 'probes' to test cosmological models.
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