Friday Flyer - September 12, 2025
This is the first Friday Flyer for the 2025-2026 academic year.
The Friday Flyer newsletter comes out approximately twice a month during the school year, usually on Fridays! :-)
Spotlight on Summer 2025...A Look Back
Summer is traditionally a busy season for QuarkNet centers, and 2025 was no exception. Thirty-six centers hosted workshops between Memorial Day and Labor Day this year, many including one or more National Workshops as part of their program.
QuarkNet camps bring together teachers from across the country for professional development and community building. Data Camp, held at Fermilab July 13–18, hosted 18 QuarkNet teachers and was led by Teaching & Learning and Coding fellows. During the camp, a team of five QuarkNet fellows led by Jeremy Smith created a draft framework for a five-day “Neutrino Camp” featuring coding activities and neutrino data analysis, with plans to refine and pilot it in summer 2026. Seven lead teachers who attended Data Camp also participated in a one-day Lead Teacher Camp on July 18, which focused on clarifying their roles, building leadership skills, and sharing experiences.
Coding Camp 1 was held virtually July 21–25, led by the Coding fellows, and several IRIS-HEP-supported Coding workshops were also held at locations nationwide. Internationally, eight QuarkNet teachers attended one of the two-week CERN summer programs for teachers.
As we wind down from a busy summer, QuarkNet staff look forward to continuing to support centers and teachers as we settle into the new school year. Please do not hesitate to contact any of the QuarkNet staff members. Contact information can be found at the bottom of the Friday Flyer.
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News from QuarkNet Central
Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) Education & Outreach opening: Our friends at SURF's Education & Outreach Department have an opening for a Science Education Specialist. See this posting for more information about this position, including how to apply.
Center mentors and lead teachers: Please work together to ensure that your center has submitted your Annual Report by October 1. If you have questions, please contact a QuarkNet staff member.
Update on the Cosmic Ray e-Lab: Earlier this summer, the e-Labs were migrated to new servers, requiring significant upgrades to the operating system and supporting software. These changes caused failures in parts of the e-Lab code, particularly in functions that handle cosmic ray data and image uploads. Our development team is actively working to identify and resolve these issues, and we will continue to share progress updates with users through future emails and Friday Flyers.
For the Calendar:
- International Cosmic Day 2025: The 14th International Cosmic Day will take place on November 13, 2025. Click here for more information, including how to register.
- World Wide Data Day (W2D2) is set for November 20, 2025. Stay tuned to upcoming Friday Flyers for registration information.
- AAPT Winter Meeting 2026: The AAPT WM 2026 will be held January 17-19 in Las Vegas. The deadline to submit a presentation is next Friday, September 19.
- International Masterclasses 2026: Fermilab-based International Masterclasses will be held March 1-28, 2026. Stay tuned to upcoming Friday Flyers for future updates.
Physics Experiment Roundup
The last Friday Flyer from early June highlighted the final result from the Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment. Learn more about the experiment and the latest result in this video from Fermilab.
A recent Symmetry article reports that both CMS and ATLAS at the LHC have observed a newly-identified "quasi-bound state" of a top quark and its antimatter counterpart, dubbed toponium, offering new insights into how matter behaves at the highest energies. Another LHC result revealed that particle spin orientations may carry information from the earliest moments of the universe, giving physicists a new probe of cosmological history. Scientists have developed a new machine-learning tool that brings an "impossible" Higgs measurement within reach. Into the Quantum Realm describes how advances in quantum computing are allowing physicists to explore previously elusive problems in physics.
The tau neutrino took center stage in a piece celebrating its discovery 25 years ago and the continuing challenge of studying the most elusive of elusive particles. The IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica, now celebrating 20 years, uses over 5,000 optical sensors embedded in a cubic kilometer of ice. Learn more about this giant detector in this article from Gizmodo.
Resources
Don Lincoln's latest video on the Fermilab YouTube channel delves into the question, "What is Time?" Another featured video, DUNE: Seeing the Invisible, explores the difficulties of detecting neutrinos and illustrates how findings from the MicroBooNE experiment are helping to tackle one of the universe's biggest mysteries.
Some recent videos from MinutePhysics include: The Magnetic Shadow Effect, The Physics of Dissonance, The Physics of Supercooling, and Antimatter in Sci-Fi Rundown.
The September 2025 issue of The Physics Teacher is now available, featuring several articles freely accessible to all. One article explores momentum conservation through experimentation with a Newton's cradle. Another describes a physics unit that uses the 2021 Texas power crisis as a central phenomenon, helping students build coherent understandings of physics concepts through a real-world event. A different article presents a real-world biological phenomenon using the example of the American football player Damar Hamlin's recovery to explore concepts of force, timing, and physiological response. Leveraging AI for Rapid Generation of Physics Simulations discusses how artificial intelligence allows educators and students to design and customize physics simulations without programming expertise. Additional articles include a simple loop-the-loop experiment, investigations to help students understand the relationship between flow velocity and pressure, and Seeing vs. Measuring.
In a recent segment of Science Friday, host Ira Flatow interviews Dr. Chad Orzel on a century of quantum discoveries, from counterintuitive phenomena to cutting-edge quantum technologies and enduring mysteries of our universe. An article published on CERN Courier explores Four Ways to Interpret Quantum Mechanics.
Just for Fun
Check out pictures from this year's Fermilab Photowalk, "capturing unique a perspective of the lab's science, environment and spirit."
From xkcd: Quite a predicament, a (not so obvious) danger of lasers, and a helpful plot showing the relationship between weather model accuracy and the number of weather balloon launches per day.
We'll end with a section we'll call Fun with Trampolines...including a video from the "How Ridiculous" crew, and another video from Mark Rober.
QuarkNet Staff
Mark Adams: markadams74@gmail.com
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Spencer Pasero: spasero@fnal.gov
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu