H1N1 goes back to school

Encourage your children to practice sneezing and coughing etiquette to prevent the spread of colds and flu.

Thousands of children across the country will head back to school this week.

For students, this means new clothes, supplies and reunions with friends. It also means an increased risk of getting sick.

The Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 55 million students and 7 million staff members attend the 130,000 public and private schools in the United States each day.

Government officials don't think that a vaccine for the H1N1 flu will be ready until late fall, after the H1N109 flu virus has spread.

To prevent children from catching or spreading the regular seasonal flu or the H1N1 flu, encourage them to practice social distancing and good hygiene practices:

• Wash hands often with soap and water, especially after coughing or sneezing. Wash hands for 20 seconds, or as long as it takes to sing "Happy Birthday." Alcohol-based hand sanitizers can also be used. The CDC recommends at least 60 percent alcohol content.
• Cover your mouth and nose with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. If a tissue isn't available, cough or sneeze into your elbow or shoulder, not into your hands.
• Discourage children from sharing personal care products (lip gloss, Chap Stick) or food or drinks with one another.
• If your children display flu symptoms, including a fever or signs of a fever such as looking flushed, feeling warm or sweating or shivering, the CDC advises keeping them home from school for at least 24 hours after they no longer feel feverish. If flu conditions become more severe, the CDC recommends that the sick person stay home for seven days. A person sick after seven days should stay home until 24 hours after symptoms have gone away.

For more information on H1N1 flu or prevention tips, visit flu.gov.

-- Brian Svazas, MD

Service Awards

Earlier this year Fermilab employees received service awards for 10, 25, 30 and 35 years of service to the laboratory. These awards photos are from luncheons on Feb. 27, March 31 and April 17.

Click here to see all images.

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

Another lecture of the Extreme Beam series will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday in One West. Augusto Ceccucci, spokesperson for NA62 at CERN, will give a talk titled "Rare Kaon Decays: Extreme Physics with Extreme Beams." A reception will follow.

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.

First black holes starved at birth

From MSNBC,
August 14, 2009

Simulations counter earlier ideas that black holes accumulated mass quickly

The first black holes in the universe were born starving.

A new study found that the earliest black holes lacked nearby matter to gobble up, and so lay relatively stagnant in pockets of emptiness.

The finding, based on the most detailed computer simulations to date, counters earlier ideas that these first black holes accumulated mass quickly and ballooned into the supermassive black holes that lurk at the centers of many galaxies today.

"It has been speculated that these first black holes were seeds and accreted huge amounts of matter," said the study's leader Marcelo Alvarez, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology in California. "We're just finding out that it could be much more complex than that."

Alvarez and colleagues constructed a computer simulation of the early universe based on measurements of the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang, which scientists think started the universe 13.7 billion years ago. The model used these starting conditions and the laws of physics to watch how the universe may have evolved.

Read more