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Wednesday, Sept. 10
- Breakfast: breakfast pizza
- Breakfast: ham, egg and cheese English muffin
- Gyros
- Baked pork chops
- Chicken cacciatore
- California turkey wrap
- Chicken BLT salad
- Three bean overland soup
- Texas-style chili
- Assorted calzones
Wilson Hall Cafe menu |
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Wednesday, Sept. 10
Lunch
- Chicken piccata with capers
- Angel hair pasta
- Wilted spinach
- Blueberry cobbler
Friday, Sept. 12
Dinner
- Stuffed grape leaves
- Herbed grilled lamb chops
- Horseradish mashed potatoes
- Roasted broccoli
- Baklava
Chez Leon menu
Call x3524 to make your reservation.
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New labwide calendar online
This week Fermilab launched a new labwide calendar, available online at Fermilab at Work.
The calendar is intended to capture all laboratory events that anyone may attend. It will replace NALCAL and the Fermilab Today calendar in the near future.
View a list of permitted and nonpermitted events for posting on the calendar.
All Services account holders may also add the calendar to their Outlook clients. In addition, Services account holders can submit an event for posting to the labwide calendar by inviting calendar@fnal.gov to the event from their personal calendars (or from another calendar they have permission to access). View instructions (also linked from the labwide calendar page) on how to implement the calendar.
If you experience technical difficulties, please contact the Service Desk. If you have questions about whether an event may be placed on the calendar, email calendar@fnal.gov.
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Particle physics to aid nuclear cleanup in Japan
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| Cosmic rays can help scientists do something no one else can: safely image the interior of the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Photo: Greg Webb/IAEA |
A little after lunchtime on Friday, March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake violently shook the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of Japan. The intense motion did more than jostle buildings and roads; it moved the entirety of Japan's largest island, Honshu, a few meters east. At eastern Honshu's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, one of the 25 largest nuclear power stations in the world, all operating units shut down automatically when the quake hit, showing no significant damage.
Then, almost an hour after the quake, a 50-foot tsunami wave traveling 70 miles per hour swept over the facility. The wave drenched Fukushima Daiichi and some of its sensitive electronics in seawater, dislodged large objects that pummeled buildings with the water's ebb and flow, and — worst of all — cut its power supply and critically disabled the reactors' power systems. Of the six reactor units at Fukushima Daiichi, three were in operation when the earthquake struck. Without power, operators had little ability to control or cool the reactor cores, resulting in hydrogen explosions that may have released radiation.
Today, radioactive water continues to leak from the damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi. It's thought that the nuclear material in three reactor cores melted, but a full assessment of their condition is still too treacherous to carry out. Plant workers cannot safely enter the areas containing the remains of fuel rods, which are thought to have re-solidified, wrapped around the floors and substructures of the reactor buildings. Robotic cameras can't be sent inside the reactor cores because doing so could release a plume of radiation. And even if there were a safe way to get a camera inside, it wouldn't last long in the high-radiation environment.
Without eyes on the inside, it's difficult to know what exactly is inside each of the reactor cores.
Yet there is one thing that can — and regularly does — move safely through the reactor core: a particle called the muon. A heavy cousin of the electron, these naturally occurring particles are made when cosmic rays — mostly protons — from space charge through Earth's atmosphere. This generates a shower of other particles, including muons, that continually rain down over every square inch of Earth's surface. In fact, more than 500 such muons have zipped through your body since you started reading this article.
An international team of physicists and engineers plans to use these particles to peek inside Fukushima Daiichi's reactor cores. The team hopes that with muon-vision, the exact level of destruction inside — and consequently the best method of decommissioning the site — will become clear.
Read more
—Kelen Tuttle
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Now accepting applications for Fermilab-University of Chicago full-time scholarship
Children of full-time, regular Fermilab employees are eligible to receive full tuition scholarships at the University of Chicago. Scholarship recipients will continue to be eligible for annual renewal as long as they remain in good academic standing and their parents are full-time employees of Fermilab. The university will also continue to provide one-half tuition remission to all dependent children who are admitted for study in the college or the laboratory schools of the university and whose parents are full-time, regular Fermilab employees.
To be awarded a scholarship, the student must be accepted for first-year admission to the University of Chicago and must be among the most qualified applicants from Fermilab families as judged by the admissions committee. First-year applicants are required to complete either the Universal Application or the Common Application, both available online. Additionally, students will be required to complete the University of Chicago supplement, which is available online or through the Common Application.
Students who wish to compete for a scholarship as a child of a Fermilab employee are required to complete a Fermilab verification form. The deadline for submitting this form is Dec. 2, 2014. Scholarship recipients will be announced by April 1, 2015, and must accept or decline the offer no later than May 1, 2015.
These are merit-based scholarships and do not preclude the possibility of additional need-based financial assistance from the university. It is university policy to ensure that financial need is not the controlling factor in determining whether a student can attend. To apply for financial aid, complete the CSS PROFILE form by Nov. 1, 2014, for early action applicants. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid must be filed with the appropriate processing agencies by Feb. 1, 2015, for regular notification. For additional information, please visit the university's admission Web page.
For information on admissions, please contact Mark Kubaczyk, senior admissions counselor, at mjkubaczyk@uchicago.edu or 773-834-2638.
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A glimpse into the lab evaluation process
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Michael Weis
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Michael Weis, DOE Fermi Site Office manager, wrote this column.
In previous Fermilab Today articles, I have described the strong partnership we have between the Fermi Site Office and the lab. Communication and feedback are some of the most effective tools available for building this partnership and for driving improvement and growth in all relationships. Since the annual lab evaluation process starts and ends on Oct. 1, I thought you might benefit from a little insight into the "mystery" of this process.
DOE Office of Science laboratories all have the same established feedback process, which occurs every year. DOE specifies the criteria, format and methodology for the annual evaluation of the labs in the Performance Evaluation Measurement Plan, or PEMP. The PEMP is part of the labs' contracts with DOE and includes eight broad, balanced performance goals and related objectives for each goal. Since 2010, the Office of Science (SC) has also included a critical few targeted notable outcomes for each lab.
Three goals (goals 1-3) in the PEMP are focused on science program delivery and are generally evaluated by the SC programs at headquarters, while operational goals (goals 5-8) are focused on the efficiency and effectiveness of execution of work at the lab and are evaluated by the site office. Goal number 4 is focused on leadership of both the lab management team and the corporate parent for the lab and is graded by the Office of Science director. The "meets expectations" targets for the science and leadership goals are given a grade of A-minus, while the "meets expectations" target for the operational goals are given a grade of B-plus. The actual evaluation process is a rather involved set of mathematical calculations, but the results are generally straightforward in terms of describing performance.
The results of the evaluations are discussed with the lab and provided in writing each year. Results determine the amount of award fee and whether or not an additional year of contract term has been earned by the lab team. The Office of Science approach provides a common structure and scoring system for all 10 of the SC laboratories but is not intended to compare labs, since the individual science objectives and notables are specific to each laboratory. The details of the process are available on the DOE Office of Science website. The goal is to support continuous improvement at all the laboratories.
I hope that this article provides a little insight into the process that is used to develop and deliver feedback to the lab on an annual basis, builds a little more trust in the process and continues to build on our partnership for improvement. In an effort to continue our learning, I will be asking Nigel and his team for honest feedback on the site office performance, so if you have anything you would like to share, let him know, or just stop by and let me know directly.
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Caterpillar on a picnic
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Fall is an interesting time of year to see caterpillars crawling through your yards and across sidewalks and driveways. They're also munching on plants in your favorite flower garden, storing the energy needed to survive the winter in a chrysalis cocoon and emerging in the spring as beautiful butterfly or moth. When you see them, do you wonder what they are and what will they become? View stunning closeups of some of the caterpillars of northern Illinos, and learn some fascinating facts about the critters. Photo: David Shemanske, FESS |
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ESH&Q weekly report, Sept. 9
This week's safety report, compiled by the Fermilab ESH&Q Section, contains one incident.
An employee felt pain in his lower back shortly after lifting a box. This is a DART case.
Find the full report here.
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The scanners' story
From Weizmann Wonder Wander, Sept. 2, 2014
Once upon a time, before the days of computers on every desktop and in every bag, there were scanners. These were people, up to twenty at a time, who worked at scanning the results of physics experiments conducted in the particle accelerators of the US and Europe. From the 1960s until 1980, the scanners, mostly women, toiled day and night in the physics department of the Weizmann Institute of Science. Their job: to help discover and study the properties of subatomic particles and the forces that act between them.
Read more
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Heavy rain
