Green partnership may bloom for Fermilab, Warrenville

Roads and Grounds' Bob Lootens stands with Shawna Coronado, Warrenville Emvionmental Advisory Commission chairman; and Angelique Dunning, head of the local chapter of America in Bloom, during a tour of the laboratory last month.

A new partnership between Fermilab and the city of Warrenville may be blooming.

The city, which recently formed an Environmental Advisory Commission, sent representatives to tour the Fermilab site to learn more about it.

At the beginning of October, Shawna Coronado, chairman of Warrenville's EAC, and Angelique Dunning, head of the local chapter of America in Bloom, toured Fermilab with Roads and Grounds' Bob Lootens.

It was Coronado's first time visiting the laboratory, and she was struck by the beauty of the natural area so close to Warrenville. "It's so beautiful and it's right up the street from our homes," she said as Lootens took her and Dunning past Lake Law.

Although a next-door neighbor, the city of Warrenville has few recent ties to Fermilab, something that both sides hope to change. Coronado said current Mayor David Brummel's family once had a farm on site, which he remembers fondly. The former farm site was one of the tour highlights, along with areas where the annual Prairie Seed Harvests take place.

To further a partnership between the city and Warrenville, the city has invited Fermilab ecologist Rod Walton to speak to the commission about environmentally friendly approaches and partnership opportunities.

The Environmental Advisory Commission will have a meeting on ways to go green at 7 p.m. on Nov. 20 in the Warrenville City Building. Walton, who is also a member of the Fermi Natural Areas Group, will talk about ways to make Fermilab more visitor-friendly and outreach opportunities. Coronado invites anyone else interested in learning more to attend. More information can be found on the City of Warrenville Web site.

-- Haley Bridger

The most accurate measurement ever made

From nature.com, Nov. 14, 2007

Physicists get down to the theoretical limit of precision

A measurement has been made on a quantum system at the greatest precision theoretically possible, according to a paper published today in Nature.

The team, led by Geoff Pryde of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, has managed to measure the interference between two light waves as they beat slightly out of step, with a precision that is limited only by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the most fundamental and unavoidable source of 'fuzziness' in the quantum world.

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Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Universe of data changes face of astronomy

From University of Chicago Chronicle, Nov. 15, 2007

Two hundred and seventy two stars gave their lives for the photo spread on cosmic explosions that graced pages 80 and 81 of the March National Geographic.

Ben Dilday, University graduate student in Astronomy & Astrophysics, assembled these images of exploding stars from observations the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collected in 2005 and 2006. The images come in the vanguard of the SDSS II (Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Phase Two), which focuses, in part, on supernovas. During its first phase, survey astronomers invented a new way of doing astronomy by dedicating a single telescope to mapping the universe in three dimensions.

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