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Friday, Aug. 23
- Breakfast: chorizo and egg burrito
- Breakfast: French bistro breakfast
- Beer-battered fish sandwich
- Smart cuisine: Teriyaki pork stir fry
- Vegetable lasagna
- Cuban panini sandwich
- Breakfast-for-lunch omelet bar
- Tomato basil bisque
- Texas-style chili
Wilson Hall Cafe menu
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Friday, Aug. 23
Dinner
- Crab cocktail with parmesan chip
- Bristro bouillabaisse
- Baby spinach salad with warm citrus bacon vinaigrette
- Berry-filled cinnamon crepes
Wednesday, Aug. 28
Lunch
- Assorted stuffed summer vegetables
- Gourmet greens with herb vinaigrette
- Buttered crepes with caramel and pecans
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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More than 140 attend first joint Argonne-Fermilab small-business fair
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| Fermilab Interim Director Jack Anderson and Congressmen Randy Hultgren, Dan Lipinski and Bill Foster listen to a presentation by Argonne Director Eric Isaacs at Wednesday's joint Argonne-Fermilab business fair. Photo: Argonne National Laboratory |
Illinois’ two national laboratories—Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratory—specialize in big science. And those research projects lead to big opportunities for local companies to bring in their expertise and help create practical applications for the new technologies that arise from that research.
What’s needed is to forge the right connections. With that in mind, the two laboratories teamed up on Wednesday, Aug. 21, to hold their first joint fair for small businesses and startups. Called “Doing Business with Argonne and Fermilab,” the inaugural event drew more than 140 representatives from 90 local businesses for an all-day session at Argonne.
“We want our science to get outside the walls of Argonne and Fermilab,” said Argonne Director Eric Isaacs in his opening remarks. “This event is about connecting the dots. It’s about building relationships, forging collaborations between the laboratories and universities and you, your products and what you’re trying to do.”
Together, Fermilab and Argonne spend about $200 million each year on contracts with—and goods and services from—local businesses, and both are looking to increase that amount. Fermilab, for example, is in the midst of constructing the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, a facility that will house offices and work spaces for local companies interested in developing products based on the laboratory’s advancements and capabilities.
Three U.S. Congressmen helped kick off the event, and all offered opening remarks. Rep. Randy Hultgren represents the 14th District, which Fermilab calls home. He spoke about the experiments happening at the laboratory and the positive impact on the state and national economies and education systems. Hultgren referred to national labs as “a never-ending loop of innovation” and said scientists can answer a greater number of the big questions with the help of private companies.
Rep. Bill Foster, 11th District, and Rep. Dan Lipinski, 3rd District, each represent a part of Argonne. Foster touted the estimated $1.3 billion the laboratories pump back into the economy annually and said the United States needs to “maintain a competitive advantage in science and technology now more than ever.” Lipinski mentioned the various ways the federal government can encourage partnerships between the national labs and private companies. “We need to do more to get research developed into new products, new companies, new jobs,” he said.
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—Andre Salles
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Sun-kissed tomatoes
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| These tomato plants are starting to bloom in the Fermilab Garden Club area. Photo: Elliott McCrory, AD |
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Argonne fair ties science, business together
From Joilet Herald News, Aug. 21, 2013
Illinois business representatives were able to schmooze Wednesday with scientists and researchers from Argonne and Fermi national laboratories during a first-of-its-kind small-business fair.
The event was held at Argonne, near Lemont, and featured three congressmen: Dan Lipinski, D-3rd, and Bill Foster, D-11th—each of whom represents a portion of Argonne—and Randy Hultgren, R-14th, who represents Fermilab near Batavia.
Two-thirds of the businesspeople attending the fair were there to see which contracts they could bid on for work at the laboratories, Argonne director Eric Isaacs said.
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Curiosity: A fundamental part of exploring the universe at CERN
From Medill Reports Chicago, Aug. 20, 2013
Hidden deep beneath a region famous for fondue, mountains and chocolate lies one of our most complex tools to explore the universe. A short tram ride northwest of Geneva, Switzerland, takes you to CERN, the home of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
The Large Hadron Collider accelerates particles near the speed of light around a 17-mile ring then smashes them together at unprecedented energies. Scientists study the debris to answer questions about how the universe works.
I spent a month as an embedded reporter at the laboratory. I wandered down CERN's streets named after legendary scientists of the past including quantum pioneer Niels Bohr, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein. I was in awe in the presence of the massive detectors that trace the smallest of particles.
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Data mining for b-quarks
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| Tracks from a b-quark (yellow) and an ordinary quark or gluon (purple), overlaid on a photo of the CMS tracker, in approximately the position where these particles were observed. |
Of the six known types of quarks, only two can be distinguished in a typical particle physics experiment. The top quark, once produced, has a dramatic signature involving cascades of decays from heavy particles into lighter ones. The bottom (b) quark also decays into lighter particles, but these are hidden in a spray of additional particles that form along with it, called a jet. A jet is essentially random: random particles moving in nearly random directions. The lighter quarks—charm, strange, up, and down—produce only jets when they decay.
In practice, this means that it's almost impossible to distinguish an up-quark from a down-quark. Fortunately, most of the questions that scientists want to address do not rely on telling the difference.
The b-quark, however, is interesting for a variety of reasons: It can be part of a signal for new phenomena; it is part of the top-quark decay chain; and it probes fundamental symmetries in the laws of nature. Finding a way to distinguish b-jets from all other jets would help many scientists at once.
Jets from b-quarks are a little different in a lot of ways. Since b-quarks fly a small distance before they decay (about 5 millimeters), some particle trajectories trace back to this decay rather than the collision point. Jets with a b-quark are slightly narrower with slightly fewer charged particles and are more likely to include an electron or muon. No one characteristic is enough to tell us, “This is certainly a b-jet and that is not,” but the confidence adds up with each additional clue, and physicists are able to assign a probability that a given jet is a b-jet. In a recent paper, CMS scientists presented the state of their art: For an 80 percent probability of identifying a real b-jet, they have a 10 percent probability of misidentifying a non-b-jet.
This is a “big data” analysis, much like the ones for which Internet companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are now famous. Among the trillions of recorded collisions that produced jets, these scientists found the few percent that are b-jets. Also like Internet data miners, the scientists used sophisticated statistical techniques and machine learning to optimize their search. Unlike big data analysis, however, this b-jet algorithm has quietly improved scientific understanding across more than 40 analyses, including searches for new physics, detailed studies of the top quark, and measurements of the Higgs boson.
—Jim Pivarski
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| The physicists pictured above were all responsible for key aspects of the b-quark identification effort. |
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| During the 7- and 8-TeV LHC runs, approximately 14 percent of the forward pixel detector was not working. Due to the efforts of the group pictured here, all of the broken channels were fixed in the SX5 clean room during the first summer of LS1. The forward pixel detector is now ready to rejoin global CMS running with all detector channels functional. |
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Sunny
