High school student works on Fermilab experiment

Fermilab scientist Juan Estrada shows Natalie Harrison a CCD in a clean room at SiDet.

Many 16-year-olds learn important life skills at their first summer jobs - the value of a dollar or how to deal with the public. Natalie Harrison learned detector modeling, particle astrophysics and C++.

Harrison, now 17 and a senior, has spent the past two summers working 40 hours a week at Fermilab. She also works during the school year.

A student who regularly enrolls in courses several years above her grade level, Harrison exhausted the available math and science classes at Naperville North High School after her freshman year. She sent letters to every local scientist she knew in search of a way to continue her education.

"I contacted tons and tons of people," she said. "Most of them never got back to me. At times I thought, 'I'll never get an internship. I'll just work at the pool.'"

It was a habit she picked up as a 7th grader while attending Saturday Morning Physics lectures at Fermilab.

"As nerdy as it sounds, I would go home and go to the library and read until I understood what they were talking about," Harrison said. "I thought it was fascinating that you could apply math to physics. This was way cooler than doing math contest problems."

Fermilab scientists noticed her enthusiasm.

"She wants to know everything," said Ben Kilminster, now Harrison's supervisor. "The poster wasn't challenging enough."

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Don't be afraid: GSA Halloween party Oct. 29

GSA members enjoying Halloween in 2009

You see some strange things at Fermilab. But the scenery on Friday, Oct. 29, might get a little stranger. That's the date of this year's Graduate Student Association annual Halloween party, where you're likely to see ghouls, witches and maybe even a Jersey Shore look-a-like or two, celebrating in the barn.

The party, which takes place at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 29, in the Kuhn Barn, is open to everyone associated with the laboratory.

The event will feature a costume contest, free food, candy and beverages and, of course, a performance by the CDF band Drug Sniffing Dogs.

Galaxies get real when the dark side warms up

From New Scientist, Oct. 22, 2010

"Cold, dark matter" has a certain ring to it, but new simulations of our corner of the cosmos suggest that dark matter – the stuff that is thought to underlie the universe – might be warm, with relatively fast-moving and lightweight particles.

In cosmology's standard model, dark matter is cold, made up of relatively heavy low-energy particles, and will happily settle into structures as small as planets. Hot dark matter has already been ruled out because its particles would move too fast for galaxies to form. But warm dark matter has smaller, faster particles that still allow for our familiar starry sky.

Most computer models produce a generic universe that doesn't resemble ours in detail, but Gustavo Yepes at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and his collaborators on the Constrained Local Universe Simulations (CLUES) project have tuned theirs to resemble the galaxies and clusters nearest Earth.

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