Lab increases preventive
care limit starting April 1

If you have your medical coverage with CIGNA POS or Blue Cross/Blue Shield with either HMO IL or Blue Advantage, you may use preventive care benefits by coordinating through your primary care physician. All preventive care exams and tests that are provided through your PCP, and that follow general accepted medical practice, are covered as often as recommended by your PCP.

Your dental hygiene is another important in your total wellness. Recent studies have linked gum diseases to strokes and heart attacks. Our dental plans cover preventative care by providing for two routine cleanings and two oral exams per year covered at 100%.

Fermilab is doing its part by increasing the preventive care limits for OAP and providing with you with the tools on how to access this information. We hope that you will take advantage of this important enhancement and make it a part of your yearly spring routine by scheduling the appropriate tests or exams for your entire family.

SCIENCE
March 23, 2007:

The qualities that helped the lab make the LHC a reality could put it a step ahead in the race for the next great particle smasher

In the 1980s, physicists hammered out plans for a gargantuan particle smasher that would reveal the key bit of matter that would complete their theory of the known particles. The behemoth would also blast out scads of new particles and open new vistas of inner space. It would be the hub about which the world of particle physics would turn for decades.

Meanwhile, a few researchers at the European lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, mused of building a smaller machine on the cheap. They called it the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Two decades later, the LHC is about to chase the discoveries never made by that other machine, the infamous Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). Designed to reach energies three times higher than those of the LHC, the SSC died uncompleted in 1993 when its budget ballooned from $4.6 billion to more than $8.3 billion and the U.S. Congress killed it.

Why did the SSC fail and the LHC succeed? Physicists can point to many stumbling blocks that tripped up the SSC (Science, 3 October 2003, p. 38). Instead of building at an existing lab, officials chose a remote site in Waxahachie, Texas; researchers made a small but expensive design change; the United States tried to go it alone and sought international partners only belatedly. The LHC succeeded for reasons equally concrete--and those factors could give CERN the edge in the competition for the next gigantic collider, the proposed 31-kilometer-long straight-shot International Linear Collider (ILC).