Last week was the annual Polympics—just like the real Olympics, only … very different. At the South Pole, they compete in nonstandard events, where sometimes the rules are arbitrary and people argue about them. (It adds to the fun!) This year, there was the traditional sled pull, in which three team members pull a fourth […]
Machine learning has arrived at the South Pole. Well, not literally, but machine learning is now being applied to data collected at the South Pole by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an unconventional telescope made up of thousands of sensors buried in ice. IceCube’s goal is to detect tiny, nearly massless particles called neutrinos that fly […]
Lighter days are coming, but last week there were still opportunities to take pictures outside in total darkness, and IceCube winterover Martin cashed in. Check out these great images he captured at the IceCube Lab (ICL). Above is the ICL, backlit by a strong auroras and angled almost as if pointing up toward the clearly […]
Last week marked the end of the 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference, the largest conference in the world for cosmic ray physics. This year, the entire conference was hosted virtually, which allowed more people from an expanded geographic range to attend; there were approximately 1,800 participants from 55 countries who contributed around 1,350 papers. It […]
There wasn’t a whole lot happening at the South Pole station last week, which gave time for IceCube’s winterovers to realize their “dark” days are quickly coming to an end. Soon the moon will be out for a while, and shortly after that astronomical twilight will begin. Meanwhile, remember the “Climb to Mt. Everest” challenge, […]
A new art–science exhibition at the Hanyang University Museum in Seoul, South Korea, features the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The exhibit, titled “The Cosmonaut,” is the creation of Dr. Michael Hoch, a scientist, artist, and educationalist with CERN’s CMS experiment who founded the art@CMS and ORIGIN programs “to foster cross-disciplinary science education engagement and networking with […]
This article was adapted from a story originally published by UCLouvain. IceCube collaborator Gwenhaël de Wasseige has been awarded a Francqui Start-Up Grant by the Francqui Foundation and her future institution, the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), where she will join the staff of the Research Institute in Mathematics and Physics (IRMP) in September 2021. This prestigious […]
IceCube’s winterovers were busy last week. Although IceCube is a well-behaved detector, it nonetheless has issues arise from time to time that require attention—that’s what the winterovers are there for after all. An update to the detector’s core control software last week resulted in some hiccups to the detector’s uptime, but all was resolved in […]
This article originally appeared on the University of Canterbury website. IceCube collaborator and UC Physics Professor Jenni Adams was presented with the 2021 Dan Walls Medal, the top award of the New Zealand Institute of Physics (NZIP), at a ceremony in Wellington last night. The medal is presented to a Kiwi physicist who is judged to have made […]
The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India, have awarded the 2021 Homi Bhabha Medal and Prize to Francis Halzen, the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of IceCube, for his “distinguished contributions […]