Hicks wins 2007 Fermilab Industrial Hygiene Award

Donna Hicks receives the Safety Award from Giorgio Apollinari, TD head, in front of a 1.3 GHz cryomodule. Hicks helped to make safer the chemical processing needed to optimize the performance and operation of the superconducting cavities in the cryomodule.

When Donna Hicks learned that she was the recipient of the 2007 Fermilab Industrial Hygiene Award, she was surprised.

"It takes a dedicated group of workers to make the workplace safe for everybody. It's not just me," she said.

Hicks, a Technical Division employee, won the award for her efforts and contribution to the Material Development & Test Laboratory refurbishment and upgrade, which allowed personnel to safely perform buffered chemical polishing and electropolishing on an R&D level. The award is given annually to an employee or a group whose efforts and support have done the most in development and furthering Fermilab's Industrial Hygiene program.

Buffered chemical polishing and electropolishing use concentrated acid mixtures in their processes, particularly hydrofluoric acid, an extremely hazardous substance. Other acids used are nitric, sulfuric and phosphoric acids. Hicks was instrumental in writing procedures for the safe handling and use of these concentrated acids at the MDTL, including the following procedures: acid mixing, detailed operating procedures for each process, emergency response, first aid and spent-acid waste handling.

She also researched the most effective personal protective equipment to use against the concentrated acids, particularly hydrofluoric acid. Personnel handling hydrofluoric acid now have the highest level of protection possible, and Hicks thoroughly trains them on its use as well as on the procedures listed above.

"Safety is ingrained in everything we do," Hicks said. "It's an ongoing process and I don't think it ever ends."

DOE CFO tours Fermilab

On Wednesday, DOE Chief Financial Officer Steve Isakowitz (right) and DOE Deputy CFO Owen Barwell (second from right) toured Fermilab before heading to a meeting at Argonne National Laboratory. Joining them for the tour were (from left) Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab CFO Cindy Conger and Mark Bollinger, deputy manager of the DOE Fermi Site Office.

The World Wide Web turns 15 (again)

From BBC News, April 30, 2008

The World Wide Web has many birthdays.

March 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee handed his boss a short document entitled Information Management: a Proposal, is one.

Christmas of the following year, when the Web was up and running on two computers, is another.

But perhaps the most important Web anniversary of all is April 30, 1993.

That's the day that Cern put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without the web, yet well into the 1990s, Internet access was the reserve of the privileged few, mainly academics.

Although the internet had been around since the 1970s, accessing documents on remote computers required the mastery of complex protocols. Scientists had been doing that for years, and at Cern, the European laboratory for particle physics in Geneva, they were particularly adept.

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Searching for an elusive particle, physicists take a shot in the dark

From Scientific American, April 29, 2008

Experimenters team up in the search for an invisible, hypothetical particle

Earlier this month, Italian researchers made a claim that, if taken at face value, would earn them a place in scientific history. The DAMA (DArk MAtter) collaboration, based at the University of Rome, announced at a scientific meeting in Venice that it had directly detected dark matter-the invisible, nigh undetectable stuff believed to give added heft to galaxies.

Although other researchers in the field place little confidence in the report, which clashes with their own experimental results, it does highlight the progress and challenges in searching for an elusive quarry that may not actually exist. The efforts of dark-matter hunters are much like the shadowy stuff itself: easily overlooked, but exerting a slow and steady effect.

Physicists know that something has imparted galaxies with more spin than they should have if composed solely of regular "baryonic" matter, the visible stuff of stars and planets. To explain the discrepancy, most look to a hypothetical blizzard of nonbaryonic matter, neither absorbing nor emitting light, swirling around every galaxy. Astronomical measurements imply that this dark matter makes up 23 percent of the universe, compared with visible matter's measly 4 percent share.

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