NICER, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, is an X-ray telescope that was installed on the International Space Station in 2017. Its mission is to study the nature of the densest matter in the Universe, found in the cores of neutron stars, by measuring their masses and radii. NICER uses Pulse Profile Modeling, a technique that exploits relativistic effects on X-rays emitted from the hot magnetic polar caps of millisecond pulsars. The technique also lets us map the hot emitting regions, which form as magnetospheric particles slam into the stellar surface. I will present NICER's current results and ongoing analysis and discuss the implications for our understanding of ultradense matter, pulsar emission, and stellar magnetic fields.

The recently approved multi-user upgrade of the ATLAS facility at Argonne will enable simultaneous acceleration and delivery of two different ion beams to different experimental areas. In the initial phase, one stable, nearly continuous-wave beam from the ECR ion source, and one pulsed radioactive beam from the EBIS charge breeder of the Californium Rare Isotope Beam Upgrade (CARIBU-EBIS) will be interleaved in time via a pulsed electrostatic deflector at injection, and accelerated through the first two sections of the linac. At that point, one of the beams is deflected via a pulsed switching magnet to a lower energy experimental area while the other is further accelerated through the third linac stage of ATLAS and delivered to a higher energy experimental area. Details of the proposed implementation and the expected gains from this upgrade will be presented. In addition to enhancing the ATLAS nuclear physics program, this upgrade will also increase the availability of beam time for applications such as material irradiation, isotope production, and radiobiology studies with ion beams. A brief overview and typical results from these applications will be presented.

When scientists report uncertainties, what do they tell us? How excited should we get when a 3 or 4 sigma result suggests new physics? Researchers in fields from Medicine to Physics do a pretty good job of estimating the chance of small errors, but the frequency of big disagreements for even the best-made measurements is orders of magnitude greater than naively expected. Unknown problems appear to have power-law distributions consistent with how complex systems fail and how systematic errors are constrained. Occasional outliers are unavoidable at the research frontier.