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On Wednesday at 10.40 a.m., the LHC operators declared “stable beams” after two years of technical stop and a few months of commissioning. It was an exciting day for all the teams involved, including those who worked on communicating the news to the public and the media on multiple platforms.
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Stable beams: two simple words that carry so much meaning at CERN. When LHC page one switched from "squeeze" to "stable beams" at 10.40 a.m. on Wednesday, 3 June, it triggered scenes of jubilation in control rooms around the CERN sites, as the LHC experiments started to record physics data for the first time in 27 months. This is what CERN is here for, and it’s great to be back in business after such a long period of preparation for the next stage in the LHC adventure.
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Give or take some important loose ends, the morning of Wednesday, 3 June saw the nominal end of an intense eight weeks of beam commissioning and the delivery of the first stable beams at 6.5 TeV. Under the gaze of the media, 3 nominal bunches per beam were taken through the full cycle into collisions. This was followed by the declaration of stable beams, marking the start of Run 2 physics data-taking.
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Oskari Vinko, from ETH Zurich, who won the Swiss finals organised at CERN last May, is the winner of the 2015 FameLab competition. The CERN winner Lillian Smestad, member of the AEgIS collaboration from the Norwegian Research Council, shared second place with François-Xavier Joly from France, who also was among the trainees at the FameLab Master Classes organised by CERN in April.
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CERN openlab is the unique public-private partnership between CERN and leading companies in the field of information and communication technology. The programme is now entering an exciting new phase and is expanding to include other public research organisations for the first time. A special event will be held at CERN to mark this occasion.
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Monday 1 June saw the start of EuroCirCol, the EC-funded part of the FCC study that will develop the conceptual design for an energy-frontier hadron collider.
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‘Engaging the research community towards an Open Science Commons’ was the main theme of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) annual conference that was held in Lisbon from 18 to 22 May. At the conference, the EGIEngage project was launched and the European Open Science Cloud was discussed.
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In terms of weight, the plastic pollution in the world’s oceans is estimated to be around 300,000 tonnes. This plastic comes from both land-based and ocean-based sources. A lecture at CERN by chemist Wolfgang Trettnak addressed this issue and highlighted the role of art in raising people’s awareness.
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Aren’t mathematical fractals just beautiful? The Mandelbrot set and the Julia set, the Sierpinski gasket, the Menger sponge, the Koch curve (see here)… Based on very simple mathematical rules, they quickly develop into a mosaic of facets slightly different from each other. More and more features appear the closer you zoom into a fractal and expose similar but not identical features of the overall picture.
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If you find yourself repeatedly witnessing a situation of inter personal conflict or tension between other colleagues, you have a choice: you can either turn a blind eye to it or you can try to help. In the latter case, you may wish to get another perspective or some guidance before taking steps.
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Hervé Milcent and Matthieu Cattin lost their lives in an avalanche in the Becs de Bosson area of Valais, Switzerland, on Sunday, 12 April. These two mountain sport enthusiasts were clearly very dear to many people, including all those who came to say a final farewell at their funerals, in Thoiry (the Ain) and Breuleux (Jura) respectively.
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The GS Department would like to inform you that until the end of December, the construction of Building 245 will result in the following traffic modifications:
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