New service wall honors
long-term employees

Pier Oddone unveils the new service wall, which lists names of employees who have given more than 30 years of service.

In today’s mobile work world it's an increasing rarity to find businesses where people can, or want to, work for decades.  Count Fermilab as one of those rare jewels.

The Employee Relations Department dedicated last month a plaque on the 15th floor honoring employees who have worked consistently at the laboratory for more than three decades.  So far, 548 names fill the plaque; 365 of them are current employees. 

“This is just a huge thank you to all of our employees who work so hard, and it really is a blessing that there are still places where people can reach 30 years of employment,” said Juanita Frazier, Employee Relations Department manager in WDRS.

Many employees can count even longer service to the laboratory, especially adding years worked non-consecutively or as temporary workers, a common occurrence in the laboratory's early days.

Pat Oleck of the Finance Section has spent her entire career at the laboratory. She worked periodically or as a temporary employee through Kelly Services, a staffing agency, between 1968 and 1975. She has worked full-time since 1975.

“They raised me,” she said of the laboratory community. “I was here at 18 and my family was in Tennessee. This is like my family.”  

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-- Tona Kunz

Jeff Mack retires

Jeff Mack

Jeff Mack, an employee in the web, messaging and collaboration apps and internal groupware, workflow, tracking group in the Computing Division retired June 25. Mack began working at the laboratory on Dec. 15, 1971, and has since been involved in many groups and projects within the division.

Mack was head of the High Performance and Parallel Computing Department when the division moved away from operator-mounted tape operation to automated robotic tape mounts, recalled Computing Division employee Mark Fischler. Mack led early developments of tools that let experiments organize their tape data and specify mount requests to (in those days) a combination of operators and tape robots.

Under Mack's leadership, the department also improved the software for experimenters that allows them to use computing farms for event reconstruction. He also delved into the use of databases in conjunction with data analysis.

“Jeff was very dedicated to his work,” said Computing Division employee Gerry Bellendir, who worked with Mack for many years. “He often brought a much needed critical eye to important projects. He was a friend as well as a coworker, and I will miss him.”

--Marcia Teckenbrock

Dark matter may be building up inside the sun

From Wired Science Blog, July 9, 2010

The sun could be a net for dark matter, a new study suggests. If dark matter happens to take a certain specific form, it could build up in our nearest star and alter how heat moves inside it in a way that would be observable from Earth.

Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that makes up 80 percent of the matter in the universe, but doesn't interact with electromagnetic forces. Although the universe contains five times as much dark matter as normal matter, dark matter is completely invisible both to human eyes and every kind of telescope ever devised. Physicists only know it's there because of its gravitational effect on normal matter. Dark matter keeps galaxies spinning quickly without flying apart and is responsible for much of the large-scale structure in the universe.

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X-rays reveal origin of Dead Sea Scroll

From physicsworld.com, July 9, 2010

Physicists in Italy have provided further clues as to the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls using a new method that relies on emissions from a radioactive source. The portable technique, known as XPIXE, could be used to complement analyses of ancient artefacts currently carried out at particle accelerators.

PIXE - particle-induced X-ray emission - involves firing protons at a sample and then measuring the X-rays emitted by specific elements excited within the material, with the energy of the X-rays identifying the elements in question. First proposed in the 1970s, PIXE has undergone several developments but in general requires a particle accelerator.

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