A special event to celebrate CERN’s anniversary will be held Monday 20 October at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, US. High-profile speakers from the world of politics, diplomacy and science will celebrate their common values: inclusion, peaceful co-operation and universality.
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CERN is not the only scientific organisation to be celebrating a significant anniversary in 2014. Earlier this year, ESA turned 50, and last week it was the turn of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, ICTP, to blow out its 50 candles. I had the pleasure to be there for the occasion, and to take part in the first day of a four-day scientific celebration in which the true value of ICTP came to the fore.
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Whether they're restarting the accelerator or sending beam to North Area experiments, the SPS Operations team has been hard at work this month returning the machine to operation. Their work is more than just a flip of a switch - rather, operating it is more akin to completing a cryptic crossword...
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Using the sonification technique, physicist and composer Domenico Vicinanza paid homage to CERN at its 60th anniversary ceremony. After months of hard work, he turned the CERN Convention and LHC data into music.
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On 29 September, CERN celebrated its 60th anniversary with a gala celebration. Hundreds of CERN staff members and users, dignitaries from CERN Member States and representatives of international organisations filled the marquee for a ceremony featuring speeches as well as music from the EU Youth Orchestra. CERN Recruitment Unit section leader Anna Cook was called in at the last minute to host the ceremony.
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Last month marked the 20th anniversary of TREF, CERN’s Tripartite Employment Conditions Forum, which held its first meeting on 27 September 1994. TREF was established to provide a forum in which the Management, Council delegations and the staff would be able to have their say on employment conditions at CERN. Its mandate remains “to oversee the collection of information [about employment conditions at other employers] and to stimulate communication and discussion between representatives of the Member States, the CERN Management and the CERN Staff Association”.
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CERN has equipped itself with a tow truck to fight back against dangerous parking habits. The Security service will use the truck to rid the site of abandoned cars, which take up so many parking spaces, as well as badly parked cars, which are often a danger to other road users.
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Emeritus Professor Sir Thomas W.B. Kibble, from Imperial College London visited LHC for the first time last week and delivered a colloquium on the genesis of electroweak unification and the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism.
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The ATLAS and CMS experiments hosted a virtual visit together with the IceCube Experiment in the South Pole for students from five different European schools on 2 October. The visit allowed the students to interact with researchers from both the LHC experiments and the IceCube experiment. The virtual visit was the second event in the Open Discovery Space project’s “Bringing Frontier Science to Schools” series.
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Pupils with learning disabilities from Alfriston School in the UK visited the CMS detector last week. This visit was funded by the UK's Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) as part of a grant awarded to support activities that will help to build the girls’ self-esteem and interest in physics.
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Over the first 50 years of its existence, before digital photography became the norm, CERN accumulated about a quarter of a million hard-copy images in its archive. Now, a project is underway to digitise the entire collection and make it searchable via the CERN Document Server (CDS).
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What do you think happened when six world-renowned poets from six European countries met eight famous CERN scientists to talk about the Universe and the Higgs boson? Six poems about new quantum physics discoveries were born from this exciting collision of literature and science in an intimate and spontaneous setting!
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On Tuesday 23 September 2014, recently-recruited staff members and fellows participated in a session in the framework of the Induction Programme.
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The GS-IS team responsible for mobility is working on the problematic equation of improving transport with a growing number of people on site.
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Do you recall our Bulletin articles on control system cyber-security (“ Hacking control systems, switching lights off!” and “ Hacking control systems, switching... accelerators off?”) from early 2013? Let me shed some light on this issue from a completely different perspective.
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As CERN celebrates its 60th anniversary, it not only looks back at its past successes with pride, it also looks ahead at the many other ways in which it can continue to contribute to the groundbreaking work of the scientific community. In the same way, it is normal for its individual members who are approaching a similar birthday to expect to be appreciated not only for the part they have played in the Organization’s history, but also for the many other ways in which they can continue to contribute to its future.
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Many people in the high-energy physics community will be deeply saddened to learn that Emilio Picasso passed away on Sunday 12 October after a long illness. His name is closely linked in particular with the construction of CERN’s Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider.
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