Folk music concert and print exhibit Saturday

Folk musician and printmaker Deborah Maris Lader's piece "Nuthatch Suite" is one of the prints currently on display in the Fermilab Art Gallery.

A rare event in Fermilab's cultural series will take place this Saturday: both sounds and sights from one of Chicago's distinctive artistic talents, Deborah Maris Lader, will be on display.

"It's a neat kind of collaboration, one that's never happened before," said Georgia Schwender, exhibit curator and member of the Fermilab Auditorium Committee.

Concertgoers attending the Sons show can expect to hear a wide range of sentiment and styles in the band's two- and three-part vocal harmonies and in its sometimes-strummy, sometimes-twangy textures.

"We can sing sweet and sad and beautiful songs, but in between, people are laughing their heads off," Lader said. "It's spicy."

A similar breadth of affects and subject matter expressed in the gallery exhibit - from a whimsical etching of wigs to a nostalgic screenprint of the Chicago cityscape - is united by the process of printmaking.

"We're excited to have Sons of the Never Wrong performing their unique, high-energy brand of alternative-folk on stage," said Performing Arts Director Janet MacKay-Galbraith. "Since the Gallery Opening is the same evening, art and music lovers can converge and attend both events."

Lader looks forward to Saturday's opportunities for exchange between audience and musician as well as between viewer and artist. She also looks forward to mingling with a slice of company she doesn't typically keep: scientists.

"What the scientists don't know is that, after the reception, we'll take away tidbits from our conversations with them that might make it into our songs," Lader said.

The artist reception takes place Saturday, July 24, from 5-7 p.m. in the 2nd floor gallery. Sons of the Never Wrong follow at 8 p.m. in Ramsey Auditorium.

-- Leah Hesla

Sons of the Never Wrong will play at Fermilab on Saturday.

How long can the Higgs boson keep hiding?

From the Telegraph, July 13, 2010

For 50 years, physicists have been hunting for the missing piece in the puzzle of the universe. At last, says Graham Farmelo, a sighting may not be too far away.

When will it show its face? Since the existence of the Higgs particle was first predicted almost half a century ago, thousands of physicists have spent many millions of pounds in an attempt to pin it down, as yet to no avail. Last week, the web was humming with rumours that experimenters at Fermilab, near Chicago, had observed the particle using their Tevatron atom-smasher. But the lab's authorities moved quickly to quash the gossip, using its Twitter feed to dismiss the "rumours spread by one fame-seeking blogger". If nature really has chosen to involve the Higgs in its grand scheme, it is doing an excellent job of keeping it secret.

At first glance, it seems odd that an obscure subatomic particle has attracted so much attention. It's not just that it would be much too small for any human being to see - theorists predict that it will weigh billions of times less than a typical dust particle, and will have only the briefest of lives. After each one is born, death should follow about a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second later as it falls apart to produce other particles.

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