According to Oxford University Press, these three words are beloved of kids. Unfortunately, one makes no sense whatsoever

Name: Kids’ slang.

Age: Far too young for you.

Jim Newman claims band who performed at inauguration is ‘entirely separate entity’ from group he was in

A former member of Village People has distanced himself from the band that performed at Donald Trump’s inauguration events, stating that the current group has “nothing to do with the group that I was a part of”.

Village People, whose song YMCA is widely considered a gay anthem and a favorite of the returning US president’s, performed at several of Trump’s inaugural events over the weekend and on Monday. However, only one original member, the lead singer and songwriter Victor Willis, 73, is still part of the band and participated in the performances.

First Quantum Minerals’ copper operation was shut down more than a year ago, but Indigenous people report restrictions on movement and unexplained illness and death

For the people of the nine Indigenous communities within the perimeter of the sprawling Cobre Panamá copper mine, travelling into and out of the concession is far from straightforward. An imposing metal gateway staffed by the mining company’s security guards blocks the road. People say the company severely restricts their movement in and out of the zone, letting them through only on certain days.

The mining concession, located 120km (75 miles) west of Panama City, is owned by Canada-based First Quantum Minerals, which operates through its local subsidiary, Minera Panamá. The company’s private security guards, not the national police, patrol the concession. Local residents, mostly subsistence farmers of modest means, say that First Quantum operates as a state within a state.

Lia Merminga has resigned as director of Fermilab – the US’s premier particle-physics lab. She stepped down yesterday after a turbulent year that saw staff layoffs, a change in the lab’s management contractor and accusations of a toxic atmosphere. Merminga is being replaced by Young-Kee Kim from the University of Chicago, who will serve as interim director until a permanent successor is found. Kim was previously Fermilab’s deputy director between 2006 and 2013.

Tracy Marc, a spokerperson for Fermilab, says that the search for Merminga’s successor has already begun, although without a specific schedule. “Input from Fermilab employees is highly valued and we expect to have Fermilab employee representatives as advisory members on the search committee, just as has been done in the past,” Marc told Physics World. “The search committee will keep the Fermilab community informed about the progress of this search.”

The departure of Merminga, who became Fermilab director in August 2022, was announced by Paul Alivisatos, president of the University of Chicago. The university jointly manages the lab with Universities Research Association (URA), a consortium of research universities, as well as the industrial firms Amentum Environment & Energy, Inc. and Longenecker & Associates.

“Her dedication and passion for high-energy physics and Fermilab’s mission have been deeply appreciated,” Alivisatos said in a statement. “This leadership change will bring fresh perspectives and expertise to the Fermilab leadership team.”

Turbulent times

The reasons for Merminga’s resignation are unclear but Fermilab has experienced a difficult last two years with questions raised about its internal management and external oversight. Last August, a group of anonymous self-styled whistleblowers published a 113-page “white paper” on the arXiv preprint server, asserting that the lab was “doomed without a management overhaul”.

The document highlighted issues such as management cover ups of dangerous behaviour including guns being brought onto Fermilab’s campus and a male employee’s attack on a female colleague. In addition, key experiments such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment suffered notable delays. Cost overruns also led to a “limited operations period” with most staff on leave in late August.

In October, the US Department of Energy, which oversees Fermilab, announced a new organization – Fermi Forward Discovery Group – to manage the lab. Yet that decision came under scrutiny given it is dominated by the University of Chicago and URA, which had already been part of the management since 2007. Then a month later, almost 2.5% of Fermilab’s employees were laid off, adding to portray an institution in crisis.

The whistleblowers, who told Physics World that they still stand by their analysis of the lab’s issues, say that the layoffs “undermined Fermilab’s scientific mission” and claim that it sidelined “some of its most accomplished” researchers at the lab. “Meanwhile, executive managers, insulated by high salaries and direct oversight responsibilities, remained unaffected,” they allege.

Born in Greece, Merminga, 65, earned a BSc in physics from the University of Athens before moving to the University of Michigan where she completed an MS and PhD in physics. Before taking on Fermilab’s directorship, she held leadership posts in governmental physics-related institutions in the US and Canada.

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The US condensed-matter physicist Leon Cooper, who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics, has died at the age of 94. In the late 1950s, Cooper, together with his colleagues Robert Schrieffer and John Bardeen, developed a theory of superconductivity that could explain why certain materials undergo an absolute absence of electrical resistance at low temperatures.

Born on 28 February 1930 in New York City, US, Cooper graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1947 before earning a degree from Columbia University, which he completed in 1951, and then a PhD in 1954.

Cooper then spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Illinois and Ohio State University before heading to Brown University in 1958 where he remained for the rest of his career.

It was in Illinois that Cooper began to work on a theoretical explanation of superconductivity – a phenomenon that was first seen by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes when he discovered in 1911 that the electrical resistance of mercury suddenly disappeared beneath a temperature of 4.2 K.

However, there was no microscopic theory of superconductivity until 1957, when Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer – all based at Illinois – came up with their “BCS” theory. This described how an electron can deform the atomic lattice through which it moves, thereby pairing with a neighbouring electron, which became known as a Cooper pair. Being paired allows all the electrons in a superconductor to move as a single cohort, known as a condensate, prevailing over thermal fluctuations that could cause the pairs to break.

Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer published their BCS theory in April 1957 (Phys. Rev. 106 162), which was then followed in December by a full-length paper (Phys. Rev. 108 1175). Cooper was in his late 20s when he made the breakthrough.

Not only did the BCS theory of superconductivity successfully account for the behaviour of “conventional” low-temperature superconductors such as mercury and tin but it also had application in particle physics by contributing to the notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

For their work the trio won the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory”.

From BCS to BCM

While Cooper continued to work in superconductivity, later in his career he turned to neuroscience. In 1973 he founded and directed Brown’s Institute for Brain and Neural Systems, which studied animal nervous systems and the human brain. In the 1980s he came up with a physical theory of learning in the visual cortex dubbed the “BCM” theory, named after Cooper and his colleagues Elie Bienenstock and Paul Munro.

He also founded the technology firm Nestor along with Charles Elbaum, which aimed to find commercial and military applications for artificial neural networks.

As well as the Nobel prize, Cooper was awarded the Comstock Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences in 1968 and the Descartes Medal from the Academie de Paris in 1977.

He also wrote numerous books including An Introduction to the Meaning and Structure of Physics in 1968 and Physics: Structure and Meaning in 1992. More recently, he published Science and Human Experience in 2014.

“Leon’s intellectual curiosity knew no boundaries,” notes Peter Bilderback, who worked with Cooper at Brown. “He was comfortable conversing on any subject, including art, which he loved greatly. He often compared the construction of physics to the building of a great cathedral, both beautiful human achievements accomplished by many hands over many years and perhaps never to be fully finished.”

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