Roadtrip! Davis-Bahcall Week 2

So, usually I would have more pictures than writing about my week, but I am not sure that will be the case this time. Last Thursday, when I was climbing Peggy’s hill, I got poison ivy… everywhere. Therefore, I have been miserable for several days. Understandably I was not that engaged in what we were touring, and did not take too many pictures. Additionally, we have been driving between 2 and 10 hours a day on our trip across the country. I don’t have a lot of pictures of that either. I will just give a brief overview of our week. Saturday and Sunday we drove from Spearfish to Ely, Minnesota. On Monday we got up early and drove to Moose Lake to canoe. We paddled around for about an hour. We saw several eagles, including a bald eagle nest with both the parents and baby eagles. It was amazing.. After canoeing we drove to the Soudan Lab. In case you live under a rock, Minnesota is experiencing political difficulties and the government was shut down when we went through. Soudan is located in a state park, so it was also shut down. Luckily we were able to get in to the surface portion and hear about the experiments. Soudan has the receiver for a neutrino experiment in conjunction with Fermilab called MINOS. Fermilab sends a neutrino beam through the ground to Soudan. We were able to see the other end of the experiment when we visited Fermilab later in the week. After Soudan, we went to NOVA. NOVA is a new detector that is being built. It will also collect data from the Fermi-Soudan neutrino experiment. Right now there is a giant room where they are going to build the detector. It was cool to walk around where it will be and see how they plan on building and implementing the experiment. I have a few pictures of this. After NOVA we drove to Duluth. On Tuesday, I was still quite miserable with poison ivy and I was not able to do much exploring :( . We spent the rest of the day in the car, traveling to the Madison Wisconsin and the University of Madison. That night I had my first visit to the emergency room…for my poison ivy. Now that I have meds, hopefully it will get better fast! We stayed at a cute campus hotel. I think the University of Wisconsin would be a fun place to do a summer internship. It is a large campus with lots of things to explore. Best of all, it is located by a lake! On Wednesday we went to a place that builds/ designs research equipment. By this point I was feeling better, so there should be some pictures . We went for lunch and I had Indonesian cuisine. It was delicious. Afterwards we walked over to learn about IceCube. It was insanely hot and even though my poison ivy was much better (thanks for asking) I was still wearing long pants. 100 degrees +20 blocks+ pants+ poison ivy = . IceCube was a neat experiment to hear about, though. It is taking place in a huge detector buried in the ice on the South pole. We got to hear from people who have traveled there, with lots of pictures. I can definitely say I would love to spend some time there. They told us about all the stuff they did to entertain themselves, such as outdoor hot tubs with their drill water, the 2 km race around the world, ice sculptures, and the liquor “rations”. The also had some breath taking pictures of the aurora borealis, penguins, whales, and sun dogs. Also by this time, we have enough knowledge in neutrinos to understand what people are saying in our lectures. The best was when they gave us University of Wisconsin IceCube-Neutrino ice cream. Yep, they designed an ice cream flavor after their experiment. It had “neutrinos” and the blue “light” that indicates their presence. Afterwards we walked some more to the Geological science building to see their visualization room. It was a neat 3-D projector. They showed us Google-earth and some earthquake research in 3-D. Then we got back in the vans and headed for Geneva, IL and Fermilab. We spent the next two days at Fermilab. It was very cool. There were A LOT of experiments to see. It was neat to see all the different jobs as well as the environment and community the scientists work in. The atmosphere was very fun and friendly with a great cafeteria and international folk dancing club  One of my favorite parts of Fermilab was seeing the applications of accelerator physics. One of these is using particles to treat cancer. They had a neutron therapy unit where they shoot neutrons into tumors where they can get them to decay and destroy only the tumor and not the surrounding tissue. It seems like a break through in cancer treatment, but it has been around since the 70’s. I found it very cool. After two days at Fermilab, we loaded the vans for one last trip to Chicago. We spent the evening walking through Chicago, including Millennium park and navy pier. We tried valiantly to find some Chicago-style pizza but couldn’t afford the 2 hour wait. We had delicious food anyways and had a fun evening, filled with heart-healthy speed walking. Today we woke up to find Chicago had experienced a freak storm with flash flooding and power outages. This made for an interesting trip to the airport, with a detour and a view of a flooded road with roughly 10 cars underwater and many more backed up. On the plane I sat next to a nice man from around the Princeton area. He told me about the campus, and advised that there was poison ivy lurking around. I may never leave the sidewalk for fear of it. I am still covered and NEVER want to experience this again. He also pointed out landmarks as we touched down in the Newark Airport, including New York City and where Jersey Shore is. Although one flight group had to be left behind, the rest of us met up with our new Italian companions and boarded the bus to Princeton. The Italians seem very cool as does Princeton. I am excited for the next three weeks.
Once again, here is my facebook album link:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150270454009893.347330.630654892&l=0782cce09e&type=1