Physics for Everyone lecture begins at 12:30 p.m. today

"Physics for Everyone" is a non-technical lecture series about Fermilab science and culture. The first lecture will take place from 12:30-1:30 p.m. today, in Ramsey Auditorium.

Scientist Herman White will discuss the laboratory's past and present and take a look at some of the areas Fermilab will focus on in the future. There will be time for questions and answers. Please come to learn about the laboratory.

Diverse group to go deep for science

A graphic summarizing the various kinds of scientific experiments that could take place in the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory. Credit: NSF

Physicists may soon be burying their dark matter detectors and other fun toys far beneath the South Dakota hills, but they won't be the only ones who get to play in the dirt.

Scientists involved in the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory recently convened to showcase various experiments that could take advantage of great depths in a mine that extends more than 8,000 feet below the earth's surface. Though particle physics research is the driving force behind the DUSEL initiative, biologists, geoscientists and engineers would also get to experiment in the colossal caverns of the closed Homestake Mine near Lead, South Dakota.

Derek Elsworth, professor of energy and geoenvironmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, and William Roggenthen, DUSEL project director and scientist at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, recently presented the scope of possible biology, geosciences and engineering research at DUSEL at the first meeting of the DUSEL Research Association users' group, which convened Fermilab in September.

If completed, DUSEL would be the world's deepest dedicated science laboratory underground. It would provide research space for 30 to 50 years, longer than other underground laboratories located in active mines could provide. These extensive time and space scales would provide biologists, geoscientists and engineers with an unprecedented research playground.

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EAP offers free depression screenings today

Have you ever wondered if you have the blues or if it is clinical depression? According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 9.5 percent of adults experience clinical depression each year. On Wednesday, October 6, Fermilab's Employee Assistance Program, in conjunction with National Depression Screening Day, will offer free depression screenings to all interested employees and/or their adult family members. Screenings will take place from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Employees can make appointments by calling x3591 or e-mailing EAP counselor Ginny Stack.

The awesome power of galaxy cluster mergers

From Discovery News, Oct. 2, 2010

The scales are mind-boggling and the physics is cutting edge, so how do you go about simulating the collision of two galactic clusters? Using some of the most powerful computers in the world, researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, the Flash Center at the University of Chicago and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have done just that.

A galactic cluster is a group of galaxies held together under their mutual gravity. Occasionally -- during universal history spanning time scales of billions of years -- two clusters will slam into each other at breakneck speeds. But considering these collisions occur in volumes of space measuring in the megaparsecs (one megaparsec is equal to over 3.2 million light-years), it's easy to see why these events take billions of years to merge.

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