Rod Walton earns Office of Science mentor award

Rod Walton helps future teachers capture Fermilab's ecology on paper, helping grow the next generation of school teachers.

"Rod is kind of like a super mentor," said Education Department's Spencer Pasero, who helped present Walton with a mentor award Wednesday.

Education Department head Marge Bardeen, Pasero and Fermilab Chief Operating Officer Bruce Chrisman surprised Walton with a plaque to honor the last six year's he's spent guiding the next generation of teachers.

"The program gives students the opportunity to actually experience working like a scientist for 10 weeks," Pasero said. "Walton provides for all of them the scientific ethos."

Walton, Fermilab's ecologist, has advised about 15 students on elements of their summer research projects and helped them write their results through the DOE Office of Science's PreService Teacher Program.

"It's nice to get this kind of recognition," Walton said.

Each year, students about to graduate with their teaching degree or those who have just graduated travel to laboratories across the country to get research experience. Some of those interested in wildlife or ecology come to Fermilab and work directly with Tom Peterson and Peter Kasper on butterfly or bird-related projects. Walton helps the students add technical and statistical information to the data from their field work and compile a report.

During the student's projects, Walton meets with them once a week. With his guidance, students have presented papers at AAAS and had papers published.

"These are projects that we would love to do but don't have the resources for. Plus, this helps us get more information about the site," Walton said. "This is a good program and it is good for me, since it gives me a chance to teach, which I like to do."

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Lab architecture

From Physicsworld.com, April 1, 2008

There are few more dramatic illustrations of the vicissitudes of laboratory architecture than the contrast between Building 20 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its replacement, the Ray and Maria Stata Center. Building 20 was built hurriedly in 1943 as temporary housing for MIT's famous Rad Lab, the site of wartime radar research, and it remained a productive laboratory space for over half a century. A decade ago it was demolished to make way for the Stata Center, an architecturally striking building designed by Frank Gehry to house MIT's computer science and artificial intelligence labs (above). But in 2004 - just two years after the Stata Center officially opened - the building was criticized for being unsuitable for research and became the subject of still ongoing lawsuits alleging design and construction failures.

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Smallest known black hole discovered

From National Geographic, April 2, 2008

The black hole, part of a binary star system known as XTE J1650-500, is only about 15 miles (25 kilometers) in diameter, said Nikolai Shaposhnikov, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Shaposhnikov announced the find, which was made using an experimental new technique, Monday in Los Angeles at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's High Energy Astrophysics Division.

The black hole is located about 10,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Ara.

Scientists say the object approaches the lower mass limit at which stars can collapse into black holes. At smaller masses, white dwarf stars or neutron stars form instead.

Space "Traffic Jam"

The scientists were able to determine the black hole's size by examining nearby x-ray emissions.

Black holes themselves are unobservable, because light cannot escape from them. But one way to detect them is when they occur in binary star systems, since they pull gas away from their companion stars.

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