Celebrate Earth Day Thursday at ES&H fair in atrium

Celebrate Earth Day at the ES&H Fair from 11 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, in the Wilson Hall atrium.

What does it really mean to be a good steward of the Earth? To get some good ideas, perhaps win an ecological prize, and have fun celebrating with your coworkers, come to the lab-wide, ES&H Section-sponsored Earth Day Fair from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Thursday, April 22, in the Wilson Hall atrium.

Taxi service frequency will be increased during fair hours. Arrange taxis by calling x4225.

Earth Day aims to create awareness and appreciation for the environment and for Earth-friendly behaviors you can practice at work and home.

"Most importantly we want everyone to have fun, learn something new and be encouraged that it really is easy being green" said Minnie Koch, ES&H fair organizer.

The following organizations will be on hand to share their mission and Earth-friendly activities: Friends of the Fox River, the Fermilab Sustainable Energy Club, the Fermilab Natural Areas and the Fermilab Ecological Land Management Committee.

By visiting exhibit booths, you can win the following prizes: two ready-for-planting maple trees, beautiful birdhouses, solar-powered yard art, bright green beach towels, tote bags and T-shirts with It's Easy Being Green logos, a weather alert radio, wind-up flashlights, travel mugs, water bottles, and more. In addition, several tables will offer miniature-sized freebies and healthy snacks.

You can learn about the green practices used by Clorica Management Corporation, which provides janitorial and recycling services to the laboratory, and Ameresco, which holds the energy-saving performance contract with DOE.

Fermilab's Environmental officers and specialists will explain new federal initiatives such as the Federal Agency Sustainability Executive Order that requires improvements in environmental, energy and economic performance. Additionally, Business Services Section representatives will display environmentally preferable products that are available in the stock room, and the Computing Division will explain their Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT).

"The hope," said environmental engineer Teri Dykhuis, "is that this will then inspire good stewardship of this globe that we all share."

Earth week prairie seed planting today

Roads and Grounds staff Martin Valenzuela and Mike Pfaff plant prairie seeds.

Celebrate Earth week by lending a helping hand to Mother Nature. Join Roads and Grounds staff to plant prairie seeds at 11:30 a.m. today at the Margaret Pearson Interpretive Trail, located on the west side of the laboratory, north of the Lederman Science Center.

Fermilab will celebrate Earth Day with a combined Earth Day/Arbor Day tree-planting event on May 4.

Novel experiment prepares to join dark energy hunt

From Scientific American,
April 19, 2010

By retrofitting a Texas telescope with a low-cost, modular instrument, researchers hope to find clues to what is driving the accelerating expansion of our universe

An experiment is gearing up in Texas to take on one of the universe's biggest mysteries by compiling a three-dimensional map of the early cosmos. The hope is that the survey will help inform astronomers and cosmologists about the nature of dark energy, a mysterious and hypothetical agent thought to constitute nearly three quarters of the universe's mass.

Dark energy is the term used by cosmologists to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating rather than slowing due to gravitation. Yet the name only hints at how little we know about it. Is dark energy a particle, a wave or a fundamental property of space-time? Has it always been there? Is it constant, or does it grow stronger as the universe expands? Hypotheses abound, but there is scant observational evidence to back them up. After all, it was not until 1998 that studies of distant supernovae provided the first solid evidence for a universe undergoing accelerated expansion.

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