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Wednesday, March 25
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
4 p.m.
Fermilab Colloquium - One West
Speaker: Brian Uzzi, Northwestern University
Title: Network Complexity and Human Creativity: The Case of High Impact Science
Thursday, March 26
THERE WILL BE NO PHYSICS AND DETECTOR SEMINAR THIS WEEK
2:30 p.m.
Theoretical Physics Seminar - Curia II
Speaker: David Morrissey, Harvard University
Title: Candidates for (Inelastic) Dark Matter
3:30 p.m.
DIRECTOR'S COFFEE BREAK - 2nd Flr X-Over
THERE WILL BE NO ACCELERATOR PHYSICS AND TECHNOLOGY SEMINAR TODAY
Click here for NALCAL,
a weekly calendar with links to additional information.
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Wednesday, March 25
- Portabello harvest grain
- Smart cuisine: Santa Fe chicken quesadilla
- Hoisin chicken
- Smart cuisine: parmesan fish
- Cuban panini
- Assorted sliced pizza
- Pesto shrimp linguini w/leeks & tomatoes
*Carb restricted alternative
Wilson Hall Cafe Menu |
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Wednesday, March 25
Lunch
- Rouladen
- Spaetzel
- Glazed baby carrots
- Apple German chocolate cake
Thursday, March 26
Dinner
- Coquilles Saint-Jacques
- Veal saltimbocca
- Spinach fettuccine
- Amaretto soufflé w/Frangelico crème Anglais
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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An ounce of prevention
Preventing accidents or injuries before they happen is the ultimate goal of any safety program. Regrettably, there are instances where planning and safety processes fail to identify every hazard associated with a job and an employee can get
injured. Departments can learn from these instances and strengthen their safety plans.
This recently happened in the Roads and Grounds department during a routine work activity.
On March 3, two senior groundskeepers were removing a tree. One groundskeeper was on the ground, picking up and tossing cut limbs into the bucket of a front-end loader, while another operated the machine.
To make the job easier for the person loading the cut tree limbs, the machine operator moved the loader closer. As a result, the person tossing the limbs lost track of exactly where the loader bucket was and slammed his hand into the loader bucket, breaking his finger. Fortunately, it was a relatively simple break, and with a splint in place, the employee returned to work.
The injury was the primary topic for the Roads and Grounds group during the next two weekly safety meetings. The group closely examined the hazard analysis plan they had developed for tree removal operations. Grounds personnel broke down the work process step-by-step to find factors that contributed to the accident. The group developed new procedures and requirements to prevent similar accidents and incorporated them into a new and improved hazard analysis plan. From now on, the operator will wait until they receive eye contact and hand signals from the person tossing tree limbs before moving the machine. The operator will use the parking brake when the machine is stopped or if the person on the ground is directly in front of the machine. The person on the ground will visually verify where the loader is before tossing limbs.
The process of preventing accidents before they happen is not always easy. Preventing them from happening again is critical. The process is easier when all affected employees get involved.
--Mike Becker, FESS/Site Services
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2009 USPAS awards achievement prizes in physics and technology
The U.S. Particle Accelerator School recently announced the winners of its achievement prizes in physics and technology. The USPAS prizes honor individuals by recognizing their outstanding achievements over the full range of accelerator physics and technology. Two awards are given every two years.
KEK physicist Yoshiharu Mori won for his contributions to the rebirth of fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators, which have numerous practical applications; the development of a novel type of radiofrequency cavity and a compact neutron source.
Argonne National Laboratory physicist John Lewellen won for his contributions to high-brightness electron beam source design, in particular his seminal work on novel cavity geometries; field-emission cathode gating and design, construction and operation of the test facility. Lewellen studies fourth-generation light source research, including high-brightness injector research and development. He is the linac manager for the Advanced Photon System and a deputy group leader for the Accelerator Systems Physics Group.
Each winner will receive a certificate of merit and $3,000. The awards are made possible by donations from Brookhaven Science Associates; Fermi Research Alliance, LLC and Jefferson Science Associates. Winners will receive their awards at the 2009 Particle Accelerator Conference in Vancouver, B.C., May 4-8, 2009.
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Fermilab gets $35 million from stimulus
From Kane County Chronicle, March 24, 2009
Efforts to expand and improve the region's premier physics laboratory soon will be stimulated.
Monday, U.S. Rep. Bill Foster, D-Batavia, and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, announced that the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will receive almost $35 million, thanks to the federal government's program to stimulate the national economy.
About $25 million of the sum will be used to pay for a number of infrastructure projects at Fermilab. The remaining $9.9 million will be used by the lab to purchase high-tech components for a neutrino detector, planned to be built at Fermilab in coming months.
Argonne National Laboratory also will benefit from the stimulus bill, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Argonne will receive $13.1 million to upgrade and replace aging electrical components.
"For the residents of the Fox Valley and DuPage County, today's announcement that more than $40 million will come to these two sites in northern Illinois marks a huge investment in our nation's future and for our local economies," Foster said in a prepared statement.
Fermilab spokeswoman Judy Jackson said the money will help "keep Fermilab at the forefront" of particle physics.
Read more
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The biggest picture
Craig Hogan, head of the Center for Particle Astrophysics, wrote this week's column.
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| Craig Hogan |
The camera necessary to take the next large-scale picture of the cosmos, known as the Dark Energy Survey, is in the works. Its name: the Dark Energy Camera. A Fermilab team working at our SiDet facility is beginning to assemble the minivan-sized device- including precision lenses 1 meter across, a 500-Megapixel CCD array, and a host of supporting electronics and industrial-scale cryogenics gear.
In about two years the team will move the camera to a mountaintop in Chile and suspend it, lens downwards, in midair, at the prime focus point of the four-meter Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. Then they will start snapping thousands of digital pictures of the sky. After over 500 nights of picture-taking spread over five years, we'll have the largest, deepest image of the universe ever made.
The DES will yield a superwide digital image of the universe, covering about 10 percent of the entire sky. Almost all of the objects in the image will be faint galaxies that have never been imaged before, about a billion of them. Most of them will be very far away, so far that their lights have been travelling to us for about half the age of the universe. The shapes and distribution of these galaxies, as revealed in the DES images, will depend on the still-unknown physics that governs the universe, such as inflation and dark energy. The DES will also make a digital movie of part of the sky, which will show flashes from thousands of distant supernova explosions. Their precision distances will allow us to probe the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
The DES results will advance the program of deep cosmic surveys that Fermilab helped to pioneer with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With a bigger telescope and a better site than SDSS, it will explore deeper, and with finer detail. It will cover a wide swathe of hitherto unmapped sky in the southern hemisphere.
We don't plan to stop with the DES. Another survey is being planned from a telescope in outer space, in collaboration with the Department of Energy, NASA and likely the European Space Agency. That Joint Dark Energy Mission will gather less light than the DES (because it uses a smaller telescope). However, situated above the Earth's atmosphere it will record finer details of the sky and take data farther into the infrared. A large consortium of labs and universities is also laying plans for the ultimate ground-based survey machine, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will go even faster, wider and deeper than DES. We can look forward, before the decade is out, to a grand multicolor digital view encompassing much of the entire visible universe.
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Workplace counseling a lifeline in economic turmoil
When times get tough, the tough, at least some of them, go shopping.
Others focus on their health. Or finances. Or family.
Whatever way you get through today's tough economic times, Fermilab's EAP provider, Horizon Healthcare, can help you along the way.
A monthly bulletin provides insights and consumer tips for commonly faced issues.
Counselors offer free, confidential help 24 hours a day, seven days a week for employees and eligible family members by visiting www.HorizonCareLink.com. Log in with the word: Fermilab and the password:eap.
If you prefer to talk to someone in person, on-site counselor, Ginny Stack, is available Wednesdays and Fridays by calling x3591.
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ES&H weekly report, March 24
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ES&H section, lists no injuries reported. We have now worked 20 days since the last recordable injury. Find the full repot here.
Safety report archive
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