Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"
For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.
In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.
"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.
Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.
Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.
"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.
...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.
But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.
They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...
...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.
Recently, Nozette, who had worked on the Clementine spacecraft in the 1990s, had been working on NASA instrument that was on board India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, which recently found evidence of water on the Moon.
The Washington Postreported on 26 October that Nozette had pleaded guilty in January to over-billing NASA and the Defense Department more than $265,000 for contracting work. The court documents were sealed because Nozette was cooperating with authorities in unrelated investigations into government corruption.
Nozette admitted that he used that money to help pay personal credit card bills, car loans and maintenance costs for his swimming pool. He faced at least two years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, according to the plea papers.
The Justice Department in a statement announcing his arrest said that Nozette had worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from approximately 1990 to 1999. Nozette held a special security clearance equivalent to the Defense Department Top Secret and Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information clearances. Department of Energy clearances apply to access to information specifically relating to atomic or nuclear-related materials
"Those who would put our nation’s defense secrets up for sale can expect to be vigorously prosecuted," said Channing D. Phillips, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. "This case reflects our firm resolve to hold accountable any individual who betrays the public trust by compromising our national security for his or her own personal gain."
The competition, held on the Washington Mall, judged 20 homes based on aesthetics, functionality and energy measurements.
The University of Minnesota's 565 sq. ft solar home called ICON cost half a million dollars to build and came 5th in the competition.
Student's have to design in factors such as is there enough solar thermal hot water for the big and small dishwashers in the kitchen and the clothes washer in a cabinet next to the small bathroom? Was the temperature in the house just right? What about the humidity? Exactly how much power would the appliances, along with the lights—mostly LEDs—draw from the photovoltaic cells that covered the roof and south-facing wall?
"We build [ICON] specifically for the Minnesota climate," said Shona Mosites, a senior studying interior design at the University of Minnesota.
Like all of the houses in the competition, the Minnesota house is compact—about the size of a large house trailer. It is extremely energy efficient, producing more electricity during the day than it uses and feeding the excess into the regional power grid. At night, when the sun is down, the house draws from the grid, but less than it feeds into the system during the day.
And like all of the other houses, the ICON house makes extensive use of green materials.
"The sliding panels are made of recycled material, and the maple flooring is two-thirds reclaimed wood," Mosites said.
A difficult road trip
At the other end of the Mall, the team from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee was struggling. The team was in last place, and were struggling to get the house's sliding doors to move smoothly on their tracks. Their house, valued at $485,000, had tabletops made out of pressed paper and cashew shells and the ability to warm up just from the heat of the people inside.
But its last-place standing reflected a 3-inch problem in the design.
"The west end of the house was 3 inches too tall to go through Indiana [on the transport trailer]," said Eric Davis, the project's chief engineer. "So we had to go down through Illinois, then cross Kentucky."
There was another height regulation problem when they got to the edge of Washington, and it took another 20 hours to finally get their structure to the National Mall. While the other teams were fine tuning their home's systems, the Wisconsin team was still wearing hard hats and putting their house together.
"We missed the metering contest, so our score is down," Davis said.
The houses that make up the high-tech Solar Village are mostly from universities, shipped in multiple pieces from around the world. Germany, Spain and two teams from consortiums of Canadian universities also have entries in the competition. And the event is drawing crowds, with long lines of people waiting to tour the houses.
"About 2,000 people come through our house each day," said Thomas Rauch, media liaison and team member of Penn State University's Natural Fusion house.
The energy produced by these small structures, each limited to 800 square feet, powers all of the lighting, appliances and air conditioning within. And on sunny days, when the houses produce more electricity than is needed, they pump the extra energy directly into the regional electrical grid that powers the metro area.
The German team's house often gives back twice as much energy as it uses—enough in one day to light 400 incandescent light bulbs for one hour.
Home improvement
US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu helped to kick-off the event on Oct 8 (see picture left. Chu is on the right. Photo credit: DOE) by describing his own home-improvement experiences while working to make his home more energy efficient. "I started doing this long before I knew about climate change. And I have to confess the only reason I was doing that is because I'm fundamentally cheap," he said.
Chu said that during his time at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California he became convinced that houses could be made 75 or 80 percent more efficient in terms of energy usage—before adding any solar panels. He also announced an additional $87 million in DOE funding to further the solar research on display in the homes.
Several of the houses are smart phone-enabled—the interior lighting and temperature can be changed remotely with an iPhone application. Others adjust interior conditions automatically, using sensors that monitor time and weather data to tint electrochemical windows and dim light levels.
But the point of the contest isn't just to showcase new technology. Each team is scored in ten different categories. The buildings must provide all the basics of daily life. Several times a day, they must pump out 15 gallons of hot water that could be used for showering. Solar energy also powers a host of appliances that include dishwashers, clothes washers, refrigerators and televisions.
Teams that score well overall are those that focus not only on the individual pieces of the house, but on how the pieces fit together to create a the houses focus on a systems approach—designing a house not piece by piece, but as a giant system.
"As we went through the 70s and the 80s, we had terribly unreliable systems that gave solar a black eye," said Richard King, director of the Solar Decathlon. "As we move into the future, to do it right we have to start from the ground up and make the whole house a system, so it's all integrated."
King, who launched the first Solar Decathlon in 2002, said that the contest is designed not to be too restrictive, to give students a blank page and see what they come up with. This promotes a wide variety of engineering approaches and aesthetic designs, he said.
The team from Iowa State University in Ames built a house designed specifically to appeal to older, retired couples. It was the only structure to be certified under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the unfinished white maple exterior is intended to feel comfortable and familiar.
"A lot of people have been saying that they could see themselves eating breakfast in this corner, that the house feels livable," said Melissa Sander of Iowa State University as she guided visitors through the house. Their house placed 3rd in market viability.
The average cost of a home on this solar-powered block is $490,000, but teams can spend as much on their project as they can afford. The cheapest house Rice University's ZEROW House—is intended for lower-income inner-city neighborhoods and is built with walls of galvanized metal that could retail for $140,000. The customized electronics and solar panels in the North House help contribute to a cost upwards of $800,000, a sum that Team Ontario/British Columbia from the University of Waterloo, Ryerson University and Simon Fraser University aim to target at young urban professionals.
Team California's house,—a collaboration between Silicon Valley's Santa Clara University and the Bay Area's California College of the Arts—was in 1st place throughout the first several days of the competition and featured a design utilizing bamboo as an alternative building material for its rafters, while Team Spain—from the Polytechnic University of Madrid—had constructed their walls from the solar panels themselevs.
Patents and prototypes
Many of the design elements have led to patents, and new prototypes from several companies were on display—from a heat-absorbing lining made of the same materials as insulating pizza boxes by Phase Change Energy Solutions of Asheboro, N.C., to a solar water heater that creates miniature hot geysers and collects the overflow by Sunnovations in Reston, Va.
On Tuesday, scores of middle and high school students from across the metro area crowded through the solar houses as their teachers held up flags and otherwise tried to keep them in order. As two middle-school boys walked between the houses, one turned to the other and said, "Wouldn't it be so awesome if one of these had a solar powered hot tub."
But that idea has already come and gone.
A house entered in the 2007 competition by the University of Texas in Austin actually included a working solar-powered hot tub, but the designs featured in this year's competition were all evidently spa-free.
NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.
But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.
ReviewJournal.com: Managers of the Nevada Test Site are ready to write a new chapter in the history of the nation's nuclear weapons proving grounds.
They hope the Rhode Island-size test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will become home this fall to a new National Center for Nuclear Security, where experts on treaty verification, counterterrorism and nonproliferation will huddle to chart the nation's course for achieving national goals.
The center "will probably be the biggest thing at the site in many decades," said Stephen M. Younger, president of National Security Technologies, NSTec, the managing and operating contractor at the Nevada Test Site.
Nevada Site Office Manager Stephen Mellington said the center will play a pivotal role in supporting arms reduction treaties and "other nonproliferation activities we're going to be doing with the intelligence communities."
NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.
"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.
"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."
Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.
NYTimes.com: International Battery, a small start-up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is developing a battery that is smaller than a cereal box but with nearly the energy of a conventional car battery.
This summer the Obama administration announced how it will distribute some $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to companies that make such advanced batteries for hybrid or all-electric vehicles and related components. International Battery is vying for a modest chunk of it.
The hope is that the grants will spur far higher levels of experimentation and production, pushing down the costs that have prevented these batteries from entering the mass market.
Various: NOνA is a collaboration of 180 scientists and engineers from 28 institutions which plans to study neutrino oscillations using the existing NuMI neutrino beam at Fermilab. The NOνA experiment is designed to search for oscillations of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos by comparing the electron neutrino event rate measured at the Fermilab site with the electron neutrino event rate measured at a location just south of International Falls, Minnesota, 810 kilometers distant from Fermilab. If oscillations occur, the far site will see the appearance of electrons in the muon neutrino beam produced at Fermilab.
Scientists are playing an exotic game of pitch and catch between Illinois and Minnesota. Their catcher's mitt is solid iron, weighs 5,500 tons, and is parked in northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. With millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, construction crews are now building a second mitt near the Canadian border. It's even heavier, some 15,000 tons, and is made of 385,000 liquid-filled cells of PVC plastic.
Five hundred miles to the south is the pitcher: Fermilab, a sprawling U.S. government laboratory west of Chicago where physicists do violent things with tiny particles.
NPR: America's electric grid is vulnerable to attack from electromagnetic weaponry, and building a smart grid might make it worse, says Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD). Bartlett, a former research scientist and engineer, offers his solution for securing US electronics from attack.
The new "hybrid fuel" engine—based on a modified diesel engine from a Caterpillar truck—works via a technique called "fast-response fuel blending," in which the engine's fuel injection mixes the diesel and gas to the perfect ratio for the current combustion conditions.
A fully loaded truck may have a fuel mix of 85% gasoline to 15% diesel; under lighter loads, the percentage of diesel would increase to approximately 50–50.
Normally this type of blend wouldn't ignite in a diesel engine, because gasoline is less reactive than diesel and burns less easily. But in the hybrid fuel engine, just the right amount of diesel is injected to kick-start ignition.
"You can think of the diesel spray as a collection of liquid spark plugs, essentially, that ignite the gasoline," says Rolf Reitz, head of the research group.
This technique has two efficiency and one cost advantage, says Reitz. First, the engine operates at much lower combustion temperatures because of the improved control—as much as 40% lower than conventional engines—which leads to far less energy loss from the engine through heat transfer. Second, because of the burn optimization in the combustion chamber, there is less unburned fuel energy lost in the exhaust, which in turn produces fewer pollutant emissions. Third, the engine can use relatively inexpensive low-pressure fuel injection (commonly used in gasoline engines), instead of more expensive high-pressure injection required by conventional diesel engines.
Reitz's experiments show that the prototype is now the world's most efficient diesel-type engine in the world, with a 53% thermal efficiency, better even than a massive turbocharged two-stroke used in the maritime shipping industry, which has 50% thermal efficiency.
Thermal efficiency is defined by the percentage of fuel that is actually devoted to powering the engine, rather than being lost in heat transfer, exhaust, or other variables.
"For a small engine to even approach these massive engine efficiencies is remarkable," Reitz says. "Even more striking, the blending strategy could also be applied to automotive gasoline engines, which usually average a much lower 25 percent thermal efficiency. Here, the potential for fuel economy improvement would even be larger than in diesel truck engines." Reitz adds that they are already meeting the Environmental Protection Agency's 2010 emissions regulations with the prototype without the addition of expensive additions, such as the urea-injection catalytic reduction used in Mercedes diesel cars and trucks, for example.
The only downside would be the need to have two separate fuel tanks in the truck or car.
Science: How will the US find the talent to fuel its clean-energy economy? Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has a solution—a 10-year, $1.7 billion education program called RE-ENERGYSE (REgaining our ENERGY Science and Engineering Edge)—and the physics Nobelist says there's no time to waste. But Congress may prefer to wait until next year.
Various: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission—the forerunner of the Department of Energy—in the early 1950s, is slowly being demolished thanks to $74 million of stimulus funding. Soon, by 2011, all traces of it will be gone reports Wired magazine.
LBNL has a flicker photo galley of the Bevatron, some of which are posted below.
The 10,000 ton Bevatron is a weak focusing synchrotron that was closely watched by Physics Today, both during construction and for the scientific results it produced.
Paul Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s and the Bevatron's mission—as the most powerful accelerator in the world—was to discover the antiproton (which it did) and explore the fundamental physics behind hadrons using beams of 6.2-GeV protons.
The Bevatron had a number of upgrades during its lifetime in an attempt to regain its status as one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and to continue to do interesting science.
In 1960 the Bevatron had a three-year upgrade which cost more than the initial construction ($9.6 million) and increased the intensity of the proton beam by a factor of four. In 1967, metal fatigue shut the Bevatron down for three months while repairs were made. In the early 1970s the accelerator switched to nitrogen ions, which were more energetic than the protons initially used in the accelerator, and made the Bevatron more attractive to the biological sciences.
By linking parts of the Bevatron with other equipment at LBNL— the SuperHILAC serving as the injector and the Bevatron as an accelerator—the Bevalac accelerator was created in 1974 which led to a completely new field of research: relativistic heavy-ion reactions. This time carbon-12 ions were injected into the ring (reaching 2.1 GeV), which regained LBNL's reputation of having the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator in the world.
Improvements to the Bevalac continued well into the 1980s. In 1982 new upgrades, which included a new vacuum system for the Bevatron, allowed the Bevalac to accelerate uranium ions.
In science, research at the Bevatron led to at least four Nobel Prizes, one for the discovery of the antiproton by Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain.
Science: Last month, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) was putting the brakes on research into automotive hydrogen fuel cells.
Chu cites the cost and durability of vehicle fuel cells, the inability to store large volumes of hydrogen fuel, the absence of a carbon-free way of generating the hydrogen, and the need to build a nationwide refueling infrastructure.
The issue came down to a simple question, says Chu: "Is it likely in the next 10 or 15 or even 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen-car economy? The answer, we felt, was no."
But many scientists and energy experts believe Chu asked the wrong question and, therefore, made the wrong call.
No alternative-vehicle technology will make a major impact on carbon emissions, petroleum use, or anything else within the next 20 years, they say, because it takes longer than that for a new technology to displace what is already on the road.
In the long run, they say only two technologies—hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles—are capable of getting the job done. And only one variation, plug-in hybrids, will be on the market anytime soon.
"There are uncertainties with both these technologies," says Joan Ogden, who heads the sustainable transportation energy program at the University of California, Davis. "So the idea of taking one off the table seems shortsighted."
Wired.com: Take a jet engine hooked up to some big magnets, add some steam pipes, and what do you have? The comeback of some old-school technologies that could help solve our modern energy problem.
The idea is simple—generate both electricity and heat in the same place, but the potential benefits are big.
Unlike a traditional electric power plant, which can convert about 40 percent of its fuel into electricity but wastes the rest as heat, these combination plants capture that heat and use it to warm or cool buildings. The efficiency of combined heat and power plants can reach into the 80 percent range.
The Department of Energy has place $156 million of stimulus funding on these steam-age ideas. It fits with industrial, commercial and municipal interest in reducing fuel costs and environmental footprints.
NPR (audio): A new multibillion-dollar facility in California houses the world's most powerful laser—the National Ignition Facility. But is it powerful enough to trigger the thermonuclear fusion reaction that occurs in stars? Some scientists are doubtful. Lab Director Edward Moses discusses the project.
Los Angeles Times: A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads built more than 20-years-ago has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays.
The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the US stockpile.
In February, the Energy department's National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the "first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the US nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy."
The hold-up in deploying the warhead is not connected to any missing expertise regarding how to build a nuclear device, but how to manufacture one of the other warhead components. Delays in the program could extend the refurbishment program by another 10 years.
The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.
More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.
In a wide-ranging discussion at the three-day Nobel laureate Symposium in London, Chu described climate change as a "crisis situation", and called for a whole host of measures to be introduced, from promoting energy efficiency to renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar.
NPR: A hundred years ago, the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle factories kept the lights on across the country by making a popular precursor to the light bulb called a mantle, but they left a toxic, radioactive legacy behind in Camden and Gloucester City, NJ.
As part of the economic stimulus package, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to spend more than $25 million to accelerate the cleanup at the Welsbach and General Gas Mantle Superfund site. It's one of 50 contaminated properties getting injections of cash totaling $600 million from the recovery funds. That's more than double what the EPA usually spends on these projects each year.
The Washington Post: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories would be spun out of the Energy Department and become the center of an independent Agency for National Security Applications under a proposal to be released today by a bipartisan task force formed by the Stimson Center, a research organization devoted to security issues.
Ars Technica: In a sign that the appointment of Steven Chu means that the DOE will not be taking a business-as-usual approach, the Department announced a series of steps that will streamline the process of using the stimulus money to get projects started.
International Herald Tribune: Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world's energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power, and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.
Stewart Nozette (Credit: NASA)
The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the 