Blogs, Budgets and Bison: Catching Up With Fermilab

Well, hello. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written one of these. Let’s get you caught up on the goings-on here at Fermilab.

We'll start with this: On Monday, we launched Dark Energy Detectives, a new photo blog that tracks the work of the Dark Energy Survey, one of our experiments in astrophysics. You may recall hearing about Fermilab building the most powerful digital camera in the world. Well, we did, and then we mounted it on a telescope on a mountain in Chile. And now you’ll get to see what we see through that camera.

Every Monday, members of the Dark Energy Survey team will post a new image, either taken by or taken of the Dark Energy Camera. The experiment’s goal is to figure out what it is that’s pushing our universe apart faster and faster. But along the way, we’re going to take some awesome pictures of galaxies far, far away, and this is how we’re going to share them with you.

You can also follow Dark Energy Detectives on Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest.

A lot of you have asked about the budget situation. Last time I talked to you about it, we’d found out that our 2013 budget would be cut considerably due to sequestration. We hope to receive government approval for a request to move funds from one future project into our 2013 operating budget, which would be a great help and allow us to avoid furloughs.

Earlier this month, we received our first hint of Fiscal Year 2014’s budget – the president’s request was delivered to Congress. That request would keep Fermilab at 2013 levels, and allow us to perform some badly needed work on our utility systems on top of that. This is just the start of the budget process, of course, so we don’t know what our final budget number will be.

You can read more about the laboratory's budget in an article by our Director in Fermilab Today here.

I’ll leave you with this other piece of good news. In the past week and a half, we’ve welcomed three new baby bison into our herd, and we’re expecting at least eight more. You’re always welcome to come on site and see our baby bison.  If you can’t get here, you can check out these adorable photos.

And if that’s not enough cute for you, here’s a terrific video that our own Derek Plant posted of our bison playing in the flood waters earlier this month. You’re welcome.

Check back here next week for more cool stuff from Fermilab. I’ll soon have an announcement about a big event this summer related to one of our experiments. Here’s a hint: it’s not often that big science comes rolling right through your town. But it’s about to.

Andre Salles is the media and community relations specialist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia. He can be reached at asalles@fnal.gov or 630-840-6733.