Bring your kids to work for DASTOW 2009 on June 10

Children learn about the Fermilab Fire Department's equipment during the 2007 DASTOW.

School-aged children will get a chance to see how education pays off June 10 when they visit Fermilab for Daughters and Sons to Work day.

Fermilab is one of many companies that honors the event in the summer rather than have children miss school in April or May when DASTOW is nationally recognized.

Exposing children to workplaces is a way to show them the value of education, help them understand what their parents or relatives do at work and get them thinking about future career options. For adults, the day showcases how employees and employers strive for a work-life balance.

Fermilab's DASTOW program returns after a hiatus last year with the traditional favorite activities as well as a new program by astrophysicist Dan Hooper highlighting cosmic images and research in honor of the International Year of Astronomy.

Fermilab will showcase its environmental stewardship with two new programs: netting pond critters outside of the Lederman Science Center and a talk about Fermilab's wildlife given by Jim Kalina, Fermilab's lead groundskeeper.

The Fire Department will have a small, replica house outfitted with smoke detectors and a smoke machine so that children can practice the correct way to escape from a fire. The smoke is non-toxic and indoor cameras and firefighters will monitor each child's path through the home. Future firefighters can try their hand at using the department hoses to put out a small blaze.

For a complete schedule of events and to see photos from previous DASTOWs, see the DASTOW Web page.

To learn more about the history of the national DASTOW program, started in 1993 as Take Our Daughters to Work program and expanded to include boys in 2003, see the Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Foundation Web site.

--Tona Kunz

Each year, DASTOW provides events to showcase the environment as well as science. In 2006, families scooped up insects in the prairie near Lederman Science Center.

Extreme Beam lecture Thursday, 4 p.m. in One West

The sixth lecture of the Extreme Beam lecture series will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday in One West. Janet Conrad, from MIT's Department of Physics, will give a talk titled "Neutrinos: To the Terascale and Beyond!"

The lecture series, which will feature talks at Fermilab throughout 2009, will give in-depth information about the science and accelerator and detector technologies that will create a world-leading physics program at the Intensity Frontier.

Visit the Extreme Beam Web site for more information.

Do you recognize
these languages?

Do you know what languages are shown in this image? See the article below for the correct answer.

This month, the safety signs at the three site entrances greet employees and visitors with the message "Safety First" in six foreign languages (see image above). The different languages that were displayed in celebration of the Asian/Pacific Heritage Month are as follows from top: Chinese, Hindi (India), Turkish, Urdu (Pakistan and India), Russian and Lao. You can find the corresponding countries on this map of Asia.

QUIET team to deploy new gravity-wave probe in June

From University of Chicago News Office,
May 15, 2009

A tiny fraction of a second following the big bang, the universe allegedly experienced the most inflationary period it has ever known.

During this inflationary era, space expanded faster than the speed of light. It sounds crazy, but it fits a variety of cosmological observations made in recent years, said University of Chicago physicist Bruce Winstein.

"Theorists take it to be true, but we have to prove it," said Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. "It needs a real test, and that test is whether or not gravity waves were created."

Winstein and his Chicago associates are part of the international QUIET (Q/U Imaging ExperimenT; the Q and U stand for radiation parameters called Stokes parameters) collaboration that has devised such a test.

QUIET's goal: detect remnants of the radiation emitted at the earliest moments of the universe, when gravity waves rippled through the very fabric of space-time itself.

Read more