Friday Flyer - January 6, 2017

Happy New Year!

Spotlight on the Virginia Tech QuarkNet Center: Virginia Tech continued its growth in 2016. The two lead teachers, Rebecca Jaronski and Nick Merrill, worked over the summer under Camillo Mariani on research to test photomultiplier tubes for a system to enhance nuclear reactor safeguards. On the professional development front, Rebecca attended Inspiring Science Education in Greece, and Nick went to Data Camp at Fermilab. The team did a great job this summer and is looking forward to its Associate Teacher Institute in 2017!

News from QuarkNet Central: International Masteclasses are coming in March, so we need centers toregister for both the masterclass videoconferences and for orientations. Orientations and updates, which start January 28, are important for the latest information and to test Vidyo links. Check the pages cited (and the schedules therein) and contact Ken for more information; the orientation registration form is now online. In more International Masterclasses news, the latest IMC circular is now available; look for these every week from now until masterclasses start!

Physics Experiment Roundup: The Dark Energy Survey is an advanced project that does, well, pretty much what the name suggests. Recently, they found something else. CMS is, of course, one of the two large multipurpose detectors in the Large Hadron Collider. Components are built worldwide. So how are those components brought to CERN? Carefully.

Resources: Physics and astronomy lost a resource and inspiration in Vera Rubin, who recenlty passed away at age 88. No one did more to show that dark matter is real. Learn more from this AIP oral history piece and this compendium of Vera Rubin in Physics Today. Also in history: 2016 in particle physics from symmetry.

Just for Fun: What if famous scientists had logos? It might look like this.

QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu