High schools visit Fermilab
for scientific symposium

Local high school students heard four lectures throughout the scientific symposium, covering topics in biomaterials, nanotechnology, astronomy and neutrino physics.

More than 300 local high school students visited Fermilab Oct. 7 to attend four scientific lectures on current advances in biomaterials, nanotechnology, astronomy and neutrino physics.

Spencer Pasero, an education program leader who helped organize the event, said exposing students to new scientific concepts could help broaden students' views before they graduate high school.

"What we would like for kids to see is that there's fascinating stuff going on in all the sciences. And they're all connected," Pasero said.

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone spoke at the symposium, telling how he moved to the United States to study physics.

An introduction by Fermilab Director Pier Oddone opened the day's events. He told the students about growing up in Peru and how he moved to the United States to study physics. He also explained the value of investing in basic science for the future.

His talk resonated with chemistry teacher Diane Bearrick, of St. Charles East, who held classroom discussions about international funding of CERN before visiting Fermilab.

"We just debated in class whether it was a good use of taxpayer dollars, so it was neat that Pier talked about funding science," Bearrick said.

Fenton High School physics teacher John Adamowski, said he wanted his students to see that "there's a lot more to science or physics than what they've seen in the classroom."

Gustavo Rodriguez, a junior at Fenton High School, said the morning talks about biomaterials and nanotechnology used complex vocabulary, but he said diagrams during the talk helped.

"It's been different than what we're used to, so we have to work harder to understand," Rodriguez said.

David Saltzberg, a professor at University of California Los Angeles, concluded the symposium with a talk about neutrino astronomy and his recent trips to Antarctica. He talked about the difficulties of launching a scientific balloon 120,000 feet up into the stratosphere. From that vantage point, detecting equipment attached to the balloon looked down for neutrinos interacting with an Antarctic field of ice as large as France.

— Chris Knight

It's on! "God particle" race intensifies as Obama tries to keep particle smasher in hunt

From Science magazine, Oct. 22, 2009

Watch out, Large Hadron Collider - the U.S. is not quitting the race to find the famed Higgs boson just yet.

If all goes as planned, physicists at the last dedicated U.S. particle physics laboratory will get to run their particle smasher an extra year. The Department of Energy has requested money in its next budget to run the Tevatron Collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, in 2011. That proposal would give Fermilab researchers a shot at bagging a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson before scientists at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, can spot it with the more-powerful LHC, which is supposed to finally start smashing particle in December.

Read more