Oddone elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced on Monday, April 28, the election of Fermilab Director Pier Oddone as a fellow of the Academy.

The American Academy, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers, announced Monday its new class of fellows.

"It is welcome and timely that such a highly respected national body has chosen to recognize Pier's qualities and extraordinary accomplishments that I and the FRA Board of Directors respect so deeply," said Robert Zimmer, University of Chicago president.

Oddone joins an elite group of scientists from around the world who are members of the Academy, including Fermilab scientists Bill Bardeen and Helen Edwards.

"It was a wonderful surprise and a great honor to receive an invitation to join such a talented group folks as is represented in the Academy," Oddone said.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the Academy has elected as members the most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes some 200 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

"The Academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields, and to the world," said Academy President Emilio Bizzi. "We are pleased to welcome into the Academy these new members to help advance our founders' goal of 'cherishing knowledge and shaping the future.'"

Read the press release.

French consulate members
take Fermilab tour

Members of the French Consulate in Chicago tour DZero at Fermilab Tuesday. Front row, from left: Scientific Attache Jean-Pierre Toutant, Thibault Main de Boissiere, son of the French consul; Consul Jean-Baptiste Main de Boissiere and DZero collaborator Christophe Royon. Back row, from left: Consulate member Amanda Liethen, DZero collaborator Patrice Lebrun, Deputy Scientific Attache Lila Laborde and Parisian graduate student Nils Hueske.

At the LHC, repaired magnets are powered up for the first time

Thirteen months after a testing failure revealed serious design flaws in nine sets of "inner triplet" magnets for the Large Hadron Collider, engineers switched on the first of the repaired sets, ran it for an hour and subjected it to a highly stressful test that, in the words of Fermilab's Jim Kerby, "releases a lot of energy, so if something is going to shake loose or be a problem, this is one event that could cause it to happen."

The magnets performed just fine, to the great relief of about 50 scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on the repairs and countless others who made substantial contributions. Kerby reported the results Friday in an email, and Fermilab Director Pier Oddone described them Tuesday in a column entitled "Triplet Crown:"

Pier wrote: "A crown is what the folks who have worked over the last year to get the LHC triplets ready for operations at the Large Hadron Collider deserve. This is the first time that a triplet has worked at specifications (equivalent energy of 7 TeV) as a system of three magnets with all its power and cryogenics interconnections in place. We have come a long way from where we were a year ago."

"It's a combination of relief and a thrill," Kerby told me in a phone interview from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border where the LHC is scheduled to turn on this summer. "There's been an awful lot of hard work by an awful lot of people to get this far, and it's a thrill to see it come together, finally."

Read more

Debunking "Lost"'s science: Hollywood sci-fi behind the scenes

From Popular Mechanics, April 29, 2008

Left, a symbol from the TV show, "Lost." Right, the CMS detector at CERN. A Popular Mechanics story, below, highlights the scientific thought behind the hit TV show, which includes a time travel plot this season. According to the story, producers of "Lost" said they have followed development of the LHC.

At its geeky core, "Lost" is a show about science and faith-and it's undeniable that this season, science is taking center stage. As the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 try to unravel the island's mysteries in an effort to get off of it, they are thwarted again and again by temporal distortion, electromagnetic energy and time travel of the mind-not to mention a really cranky smoke monster that may or may not have a basis in science.

In a revealing interview with Popular Mechanics on the eve of "Lost"'s return from a strike-induced hiatus, show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse insisted that they agonize over the real-life science behind the sci-fi drama as much as they do over six-year plot arcs and love triangles.

Read more