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Private Donor Saves Fermilab
sciencehabit writes "In what has to be an embarrasment for the U.S. Department of Energy, an anonymous donor has ponied up $5 million to keep the country's only remaining particle physics laboratory operating efficiently."
Next time you use a computer, think: positrons are an unrivaled probe of defects in Si crystals. They make excellent diagnostic tools to see if a particular batch of computer chips is going to go bad.
Next time you or someone you care for gets radiological treatment, think: accelerators make lots of things which are used to diagnose and treat cancers.
The administration asked for increased funding for the DOE Office of Science. Congress instead slashed its budget --- all while fully funding Bush's multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq.
When Congress cuts the budget, there's nothing the administration can do.
If the Democrats in Congress really wanted to end the war in Iraq, they could do it tomorrow by revoking its funding. But why would they end it, when it's their best polling issue?
Sometimes, Democracy just plain sucks.
Fermilab is barred from proposing and receiving science funding from the NSF or DOE on its own. Any high energy physics or computing project at Fermilab that gets funded has to be at least co-lead by a University professor. Over the last twenty years or so, as the universities became more and more aggressive about protecting their turf, more and more projects left the lab. When I left there six years ago, the writing was already on the wall. Smaller experiments were slashed in favor of the mega collaborations DZero and CDF, computing was shifted to the "Grid", and both trends were very efficient at shifting power and projects out of the lab. Except for operations, there was very little being done at the lab. One wonders if it was planned that way.