MINOS to present results today at 4 p.m. in One West

MINOS collaboration members will present results concerning muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations at a series of talks taking place today at Fermilab, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven National Accelerator Laboratory, and early next week at CERN.

The talks are based on analysis of a dataset that more than doubles the data published in earlier MINOS studies. MINOS collaborator Ryan Patterson will present the new results at 4 p.m. today, following Wine and Cheese, in One West.

Members of Chicago's Swiss community visit Fermilab

Members of the Swiss community of Chicago visited Fermilab on March 25 as part of "Big Bang at CERN in Switzerland," an event hosted by Fermilab and the Consul General of Switzerland. Giambattista Mondada, Consul General of Switzerland, pictured above wearing a purple tie, and community members ate Swiss food and American apple pie, toured the laboratory and heard lectures from Fermilab scientists and experiment collaborators.

Fermilab announces arrival of new maternity closet

Fermilab's new maternity closet is now open on the 15th floor.

There is little more frustrating than spending a lot of money on an article of clothing, such as an evening gown, and then never wearing it again. Maternity clothes fall into that category, and now Fermilab has a program to help ease that frustration, not to mention save some cash for mothers-to-be.

The Mothers at Work program is pleased to announce the creation of a "maternity closet" for employees, users and spouses. The maternity closet contains gently used clothing for expectant mothers to use and allows those women to donate clothes when the clothes are no longer needed.

"The addition of the maternity closet allows women to not worry about paying a lot of money for something they wear a brief amount of time," said Amber Johnson, an engineering physicist in Fermilab's Accelerator Division.

In addition, the Fermilab Mothers at Work program offers a Mothers' Room for women who want to continue nursing. The Employee Assistance Program also offers a new baby kit and child care provider research.

Heather Sidman, a Fermilab workforce relations specialist, is in charge of the Mothers at Work group. She created the maternity closet after researching benefits at other top companies. Sidman believes these programs help to make Fermilab a family-friendly workplace.

"Science careers can be very time-consuming, with lots of long hours for many years. Women often struggle to decide whether to postpone motherhood or risk derailing their careers. The Mothers at Work group makes the decision much easier," said Maggie Stauffer, a technician in the Accelerator Division.

The maternity closet is located on the 15th floor of Wilson Hall and is now open. Those interested in using or donating clothes should make an appointment with Heather Sidman at x3326 or Jeannelle Smith at x4367. All clothing should be gently used and in fashion.

-- Tonisha Taylor

Just stopping by

PPD's Dave Huffman submitted this photo of a turkey vulture that landed outside of his office window on Wilson Hall's 14th floor.

Our universe at home within a larger universe? So suggests physicist's wormhole research

From Science Daily, April 7, 2010

Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe?

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the journal edition April 12.

Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic coordinates to describe the gravitational field of a black hole and to model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole.

In studying the radial motion through the event horizon (a black hole's boundary) of two different types of black holes -- Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen, both of which are mathematically legitimate solutions of general relativity -- Poplawski admits that only experiment or observation can reveal the motion of a particle falling into an actual black hole. But he also notes that since observers can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless an observer enters or resides within.

"This condition would be satisfied if our universe were the interior of a black hole existing in a bigger universe," he said. "Because Einstein's general theory of relativity does not choose a time orientation, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future then the reverse process is also possible. Such a process would describe an exploding white hole: matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe."

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