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At its March meeting, the Council took the step of extending Rolf Heuer’s mandate until the end of 2015. What can we expect from the extra two years?
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The March Council session is the occasion for CERN’s annual performance appraisal, but instead of the MARS form familiar to CERN staff, the lab’s working document is an Annual Progress Report, linked to the Medium-Term Plan, matching achievements to objectives. This year, I think it’s fair to say, we were firmly able to tick the ‘achieved’ box.
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On the evening of Friday 16 March beams were accelerated in the LHC at 4 TeV for the first time: a new world record! According to the schedule for the machine restart it will take another three weeks before the stable beams mode – the requirement for the detectors to start taking data – is achieved.
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At a time when we are about to shed light on the fundamental question of the creation of mass after the Big Bang, we are also close to solving another basic mass-related problem. The kilogram is the only base unit of the International System of Units (SI) whose official definition is still based on a material artefact rather than on invariant quantities. If you are now thinking that this concerns you less than the glamorous Higgs boson, think again: your scales could give you a different value when you use them tomorrow.
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A promising project that was hailed at the ICTR-PHE 2012 medical conference (see Bulletin issues 10-11/2012 and 12-13/2012) has seen the light of day at CERN. The project, known by the name of MEDICIS, will make it possible to produce a large variety of radioactive isotopes for medical research.
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The COMPASS experiment is preparing for a new phase in its physics programme: COMPASS-II. Due to start in 2014, COMPASS-II will bring a powerful new look at the building blocks of protons: quarks and gluons.
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In a survey of 21,000 European students, CERN ranked 15th, ahead of giants like Microsoft and Nestlé, for the quality of its on-line "talent communication", that is how it uses the Internet to attract job applicants. HR now boasts a new virtual award, certifying its on-line savvy.
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Jean Trân Thanh Vân is the founding father of the “Rencontres de Moriond”, one of the most widely anticipated annual physics conferences throughout the world. Important results are presented every year. After Moriond, Jean Trân Thanh Vân went on to set up the “Rencontres de Blois”, then the “Rencontres du Vietnam” in the country from which he originates. In 2013 a completely new conference centre will be inaugurated at Quy Nhon (Vietnam). Yet another project launched by Jean Trân Thanh Vân.
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'Accelerating Science', CERN’s travelling science outreach exhibition, has just arrived at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey for a four-month stay there. This is the first time it has moved outside the circle of the Member States. The Turkish venue will inaugurate some new exhibits that have recently been developed by CERN’s software developers.
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Radio-oncologists and radiotherapists represented a large proportion of the doctors and clinicians who attended the ICTR-PHE 2012 conference. With them were also biologists and doctors of nuclear medicine. They presented the state of the art of their research that touches on the genetics and biology of tumours as well as on futuristic drugs that selectively target malignant cells. The future of cancer treatment seems to lie in the personalised approach.
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23 petabytes is how much data CERN recorded during 2011, and this number will rise in 2012. In order to respond to the challenge, the IT department is upping its game, amongst other things by participating in the Helix Nebula project, a public-private partnership to create a European cloud-computing platform, as announced in a recent CERN press release.
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e-EPS News is a monthly addition to the CERN Bulletin line-up, showcasing articles from e-EPS – the European Physical Society newsletter – as part of a collaboration between the two publications.
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Thanks to the enormous computing capacity of the CERN Computer Centre, which hosts about 12,000 servers with 16,000 CPUs (i.e. 64,000 computing cores) and 64,000 hard-disks distributed over 1,100 racks and storing another 22 PB (PetaByte, i.e. 22 million billion bytes) of LHC data during 2011, CERN computing specialists have managed for the first time to reconstruct the “Higgs” (see photo below in which the newly installed racks are highlighted).
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In this series, the Bulletin aims to explain the role of the Ombuds at CERN by presenting practical examples of misunderstandings that could have been resolved by the Ombuds if he had been contacted earlier. Please note that, in all the situations we present, the names are fictitious and used only to improve clarity.
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