About 150 people are expected to attend the three-day workshop to improve analysis techniques at the LHC by studying Tevatron data. Topics will include electroweak interactions, the Higgs boson, QCD and searches for new physics. The opening workshop was held at Fermilab last September with follow-up sessions at Brookhaven National Laboratory in February and at CERN in April.
—Kendra Snyder

To Taka Maruyama, the most exciting moment in top quark research wasn't its discovery ten years ago. It's right now. With years of strong Fermilab top quark data under CDF's belt, Maruyama is most enthralled by what discoveries the famous particle can help uncover today and in the future.

Maruyama, one of CDF's conveners for top quark physics, was a student at Japan's Tohoku University when Fermilab made headlines about the top quark discovery. "It had a very big impact," he said. "Even in Japan it was on the front page of the newspapers." Maruyama joined the CDF collaboration in 2002 as a postdoc from the University of Chicago.

"The properties of the top quark are still an interesting part of our field," Maruyama said. "Indeed, the last two or three years have been most exciting for the top quark." Tevatron luminosity, the measurement of particle collisions, has greatly increased since Run II began. Maruyama said that with more data available for top quark analysis, scientists can conduct more precise measurements of top mass, decay and production cross section.

With improved top quark measurements, scientists also are able to indirectly measure the Higgs mass, Maruyama said. Those measurements could aid the search for the actual Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. "With what we have learned about the top, the LHC experiments can imagine what mass the Higgs boson has and they can pin down what mass range they should search."
—Kendra Snyder

In the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the president has directed all Federal Agencies to do their part to save as much energy as possible. Here at Fermilab, even small changes will make a difference. During the winter months, consider opening blinds to let in sunlight and switching of extra lights when they are not needed. Make new friends at the lab by arranging carpools, and only print and photocopy what you really need on paper.

"As part of the national response to Hurricanes Katrine and Rita," Stephen Webster of the DOE Fermi Site Office reminds us, "We all need to do our part." It's always been a good idea to save energy, but this plea comes at an especially crucial time for the energy infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico, which was forced to take offshore oil production and three-quarters of natural gas production offline after the hurricanes ripped through the region.

Fermilab is poised to make a real difference during the coming winter. In an October 13 message, the United States Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman, emphasized the important role that agencies like Fermilab, which are located in the colder regions of the country, will play in this effort. Steve Krstulovich, Fermilab's energy conservation expert explained, "This is one of those rare opportunities where we can actually do something to improve our lot, both individually and nationally."
—Siri Steiner

For millions of listeners across the world, the enchanting lyrics proved an instant hit. But for one physicist, some of the lyrics of Katie Melua's single Nine Million Bicycles was light years away from fact - and something had to be done.

Katie Melua: no right to 'guess' at the age of the universe Simon Singh took issue with the second verse of the song which stated that, at a "guess", the edge of the universe was "12 billion light years away". Now, after publicly correcting her statistical error, the 21-year-old musician agreed to re-record the track, changing the lyric to the more factual 13.7 billion light years.

Mr Singh, 41, who has recently written a book on the history of cosmology called Big Bang, described the flaw as "deeply annoying".

He said yesterday: "It's the word 'guess' that I rail against. I can guess the lottery numbers for next week but the edge of the universe is better than that.
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