Recently in Laboratories Category

Nature News: A new generation of light sources—the newly completed Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, one under construction in Japan and the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) being built at at DESY in Germany—are getting set not only to put atoms and molecules under the spotlight, but also to illuminate their dynamics.

The devices, called X-ray free-electron lasers, produce flashes of X-ray light with angstrom-level wavelengths—small and coherent enough to image individual atoms. The flashes are also more intense than any created before—stuffed with enough photons to create and study extreme states of matter such as plasma.

But perhaps most importantly, the bursts of light are short—just hundreds of femtoseconds long, the time it takes for light to cross a human hair. Pulses as brief as this can record functions, not just forms: the folding of a protein, the action of a catalyst, the splitting of a chemical bond.

Physics Today: [First published 6:10am EST 10/6/09, last updated 11:33am EST] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 with one half of the $1.4 million to

Charles K. Kao
Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK, and Chinese University of Hong Kong

"for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication"

and the other half jointly to

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA

"for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor."

"The [transfer of] information in society today is completely based on [this research]," said Joseph Nordgren, the chair of the Nobel Prize committee in a press conference announcing the prize. "The practical implications for this research were enormous...It is something that has changed our life, not just in science but in society as whole."

Fred Dylla, CEO of the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, concurs. "When combined with the laser and the transistor, the invention of an efficient, low-loss optical fiber has made nearly instantaneous communication possible across the entire globe. This mode of communication is essential for high-speed internet and forms the optical backbone of 21st century commerce. The CCD sensor has revolutionized technical, professional, and consumer photography in the last few decades. Taken together these inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half century."

"Optics technologies are exceptionally significant for scientific developments in today’s world," said Elizabeth Rogan, CEO, of the Optical Society of America. "We congratulate Kao, Boyle and Smith on this much-deserved recognition."

Kao

In 1966, Charles K. Kao made a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics. He carefully calculated how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers. With a fiber of purest glass it would be possible to transmit light signals over 100 kilometers, compared to only 20 meters for the fibers available in the 1960s. "It was the impurities, and other limiting factors such as scattering, atomic motion, that limited glass fibers in the 1960s," said Nordgren.

Kao presented his research at the 1966 London meeting of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The first ultrapure fiber was successfully fabricated just four years later, in 1970 by the Corning company.

"The Nobel Prize isn't awarded for lifetime achievement, it is given for diverse research, clearly Kao's work achieved a breakthrough that led to a whole new research and technology field," said Nordgren.

Boyle and Smith

In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (charge-coupled device).

The two researchers came up with the idea in just an hour of brainstorming, according to Boyle who spoke during a press conference today. "It is amazing that a [the CCD device] was created so quickly," said Nordgren. "There are so many breakthroughs that came out of research at Bell labs...it's unfortunate that during the 80s, US companies abandoned the idea of having a scientific environment such as Bell labs," said Nordgren.

Boyle said that to him, the biggest achievement of his work was seeing images transmitted back from Mars. "It wouldn't have been possible without our invention," he said.

The CCD technology makes use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein and for which he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize. By this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge, when designing an image sensor, was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, pixels, in a short time.

The CCD is the digital camera's electronic eye. It revolutionized how images were collected from spacecraft, by telescopes, and in medical imaging, and has eventually replaced the film camera in every aspect of photography.

Related Physics Today articles on fiber optics
Maurer and Kao win Ericsson Prize, May 1979
An Overview of Lightguide communication, Solomon J. Buchsbaum, May 1976
The fiber lightguide, Alan G. Chynoweth, May 1976
Fiber optics, Alastair M. Glass, October 1993
The golden age of optical fiber amplifiers, Emmanuel Desurvire, January 1994

Related Physics Today articles on CCDs
Charge-coupled devices would be cheap, compact Gloria B. Lubkin, October 1970
From photons to bits, Rajinder P. Khosla, December 1992

Other Related Physics Today Resources
Industrial R&D in transition, R. Joseph Anderson and Orville R. Butler, July 2009
The bell tolls for Bell Labs Toni Feder, October 2008
Industry R&D forecast is bullish despite concerns over talent dearth, Jermey N. A. Matthews, April 2008
Bell Labs fissions, yielding AT&T Bell Labs and Bellcore, Gloria B. Lubkin, May 1984

Related Resources
2009 Physics Nobel Prize Resources American Institute of Physics
A 2004 oral history interview with Charles K. Kao IEEE History Center
A 2001 oral history interview with George E. Smith IEEE History Center

Related News Stories
3 Americans share 2009 Nobel Prize in physics Associated Press
Communication pioneers win 2009 physics Nobel Reuters
Nobel awarded for advances in harnessing light New York Times
Nobel prize in physics goes to Briton who harnessed the power of light The Guardian
Fiber optics, imaging pioneers win physics Nobel NPR
Light work wins Nobel for electronics pioneers New Scientist
Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to light pioneers Nature
Pioneers of fiber optics, semiconductors win Nobel NPR
3 Americans win Nobel in physics LA Times
2009 Physics Nobel Winners See the Big Picture ScienceNow
Nobel winners who probably changed your life Washington Post

Physics Today: Earlier this week Alan Taub became the new vice president of Research and Development for General Motors. Despite going into and out of bankruptcy, GM is still one of the largest companies in the US that conducts industrial R&D.

Taub (see left image) has run GM's eight science labs for the last nine years and was a key player in building GM's newest R&D lab in Shanghai that officially opened last month.

In his new role, Taub will still coordinate all the advanced technical work within GM, but will be more closely involved in managing GM's collaborative R&D ventures with academia, the Department of Energy, and other strategic partners.

Physics Today Online was lucky enough to ask some questions in a public webcast held on Tuesday. An edited transcript is below.

[Question]: What is the future of fuel cells within the new GM, do we have enough funds to run them?

Taub: Fuel cells are still an important activity for General Motors. And part of the solution to diversifying the energy source for vehicles. We remain committed to developing the technology but as we approach early commercialization, the costs of development are increasing.

[Question]: How do you envision the global R&D organizations work together? How will "who does what" be determined?

Taub: Working with my leadership team, we select the competencies to be developed at each of the eight R&D labs'. Multidisciplinary teams then integrate the labs programs globally to gain the most effective results. The competency selection for each site is based on availability of talent.

[Question]: Why do you believe globalization of GM's R&D activities is necessary?

Taub: Innovation and breakthrough research are enabled by diversity—diversity of education, the working environment and the local marketplace. We have been successful at having researchers located in different sites globally and bringing their ideas together so the team has more perspectives for new ideas.

[Question]: The easiest way to improve fuel efficiency is to cut down on weight. The New York Times had an article on how 60% of the weight of a car is due to steel, and how new types of steel are going into cars to provide safety and lightness. What is GM doing in this area, do you do the basic R&D yourself or do you rely on your partners?

Taub: In the past 15 years, we have dramatically changed the [steel] material mix on vehicles. For example, GM is increasing it's usage of high-strength steels to the point that in the next 10 years we will see very little low-carbon steel in the structural bodies of GM vehicles.

As well as changing the steel mix, GM is also increasing usage of aluminum and magnesium. This is accomplished by collaborations of GM and supplier engineers as well as precompetitive research with Ford and Chrysler in US.

[Question]: Battery technology seems to have significant limitations. Is GM looking at ultra-capacitors as well?

Taub: Yes, we are looking at batteries, fuel cells and ultracapacitors as energy storage devices. We see a role for each.

[Question]
Will you use the plugin technology from the canceled Saturn Vue "two-mode" hybrid in any other small SUVs in the future?

Taub: All we said so far is that the technology will go into another GM product. Stay tuned.

[Question]: To succeed, GM needs world class scientists. After bankruptcy, how does it propose to attract and retain them?

Taub: We have been successful at attracting the best and the brightest from around the world to the various GM global laboratories. People are intrigued by the combination of deep technical assignments on products that make a difference to consumers everywhere.

[Question]: We've seen impressive demos on Vehicle to Vehicle communications technology from GM. What are the remaining obstacles to introducing this technology into the marketplace?

Taub: We are continuing "harden" the technology in order to enable commercialization. Because this is a safety-related technology, it must be robust. It also requires standards for all of GM's suppliers since the vehicle parts needs to interact. There is progress being made on all fronts.

[Question]: What do you see as the biggest challenge in transitioning to wide-spread electric vehicle use?

Taub: Two things. Getting the cost down and the supply base ready.

[Question]: What is your personal favorite research topic at the moment?

Taub: Clearly, it is the electrification of the vehicle. Batteries, motors, hydrogen fuel cells are dominating the research portfolio. At the same time, the connected vehicle (e.g. navigation, OnStar, infotainment) is probably the most fun because we get to implement it at consumer electronics speed.

[Question]: Do you envision GM R&D researchers doing fundamental researchers? Or do you see the researchers act as project managers, and the universities act as the actual researchers?

Taub: The answer is both. Inside GM, we have the world's best individual contributors performing leading edge research on critical automotive applications. They do their work inside our walls while collaborating with the best professors and engineers in universities and national labs.

[Question]: Can you speak to GM's R&D center in Honeoye Falls, New York, the role its played so far, and the type of role it might play moving forward?

Taub: Honeoye Falls is the site of one of our eight global laboratories. It is our main site for fuel cell stack research and more recently battery system research. It will continue to be an important element of our research infrastructure.

[Question]: How's that shape-changing NiTinol material coming along. Any production plans on the horizon?

Taub: Our first application is being deployed as we speak. I just can't tell you at this time what that vehicle is.

[Question]: I wonder what makes fuel cells expensive? It seems very affordable for a new technology. If a fuel cell car has 100 grams of platinum, which is about $3000-4000, the rest of the materials involved is not that much expensive.

Taub: There are many elements that contribute to the cost of vehicle components. Raw material is only one aspect. On the fuel cell stack, our next-generation technology dramatically reduces the platinum loading, making it competitive with that on after-treatment for internal combustion engines.

[Question]: What is the research focus of the science lab in China?

Taub: Glad you asked. I am just back from Shanghai and the jet lag is almost gone. The initial areas of attention are improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines, lightweight materials and the joining technology for those materials, emerging market safety, consumer research methodologies and batteries.

[Question]: How far into the future do think it will be before we see automated cars driving on the expressway?

Taub: I'm on the record for promising limited autonomy driving on highways by 2015. This is enabled by a combination of lane keeping and stop-and-go adaptive cruise control.

[Question]: How does GM R&D foster a culture of innovation and creativity while simultaneously having researchers be accountable for their work and in tune with the overall cost of their projects?

Taub: Welcome to the challenge of leading an industrial research laboratory. We pull on our researchers to solve the tough problems facing the industry while adding to the world's scientific knowledge base. We lead the industry in patents—we filed more than 600 within R&D alone last year—and lead in technology implementation in the product.

[Question]: In your introduction you talked about "mainstreaming R&D." What does this mean and is GM allowing other employees to contribute ideas?

Taub: R&D is now fully integrated into Product Development at GM. That is allowing us to get more streamlined in our technology development and implementation activities. We are always looking for good ideas from both inside and outside the company. Feel free to contact any of our group managers, lab directors or me if you don't know who else to email.

[Question]: The development of the next generation of fuel-efficient vehicles requires advancements and a deep understanding across a wide range of materials (electrode materials for batteries, catalysts for fuel cells). How do you draw the line between what GM can develop and what must be developed by others to make a particular technology successful? Basically how deep into basic research does GM want to go?

Taub: The make-buy decision is different for every technology. For example, stamping of metals for the key components of the vehicle is a core technology within GM. The plastic parts are generally purchased from suppliers. The recent decision to vertically integrated into battery pack manufacturing does not mean we would be manufacturing our own battery cells. However, we are working internally on next-generation cell technology in collaboration with various suppliers.

Physics Today: Peter Chen, the well-known and eminent head of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH Zürich) has resigned after an investigation—at his request—concluded that falsified data had been published in a doctoral thesis of one of his research students and in two papers that his research group had submitted and published in the Journal of Chemical Physics. The investigation could not conclude who was responsible for the falsifications.

In a statement released by ETH Zürich the institute said "out of respect for ETH Zürich and the function as head of research, Peter Chen has acknowledged his responsibility and decided to step down as vice president at the end of September 2009."

"Scientific misconduct jeopardizes the very core of research and must carry consequences," says ETH Zürich President Ralph Eichler. "This has been the case here and the matter also shows that the established control mechanisms for research really do work."

The research projects affected hail from the field of basic research in chemistry at ETH Zürich and were published in 2000 by members of the team then headed by Chen. He has been professor of physical-organic chemistry since 1994 and the vicepresident of research and corporate relations since 2007.

The papers under suspicion concerned results relating to the spectroscopic structural clarification of hydrocarbon radicals: short-lived chemical compounds that are formed during combustion processes. The number of citations accrued by the two papers is 66, which is quite a large score.

Intensive search for discrepancies

The experiments were conducted with the so-called "zero-kinetic-energy photoelectron spectroscopy" (ZEKE) method, a high-resolution version of photoelectron spectroscopy. The method can be used, among other things, to analyze highly reactive or unstable compounds. The measurements include those of the energies of electrons that break away from the molecule under examination after it has absorbed light. The spectra determined as a result can then be used to analyze the geometric structure and dynamics of the compounds.

However, after the papers were published, other research groups working in the same field obtained significantly different results.

Chen's group set about seeking an explanation for the discrepancies in conjunction with a former postdoctoral researcher's group. The discrepancies initially involved the ionization energies of hydrocarbon radicals, that is, the energy required to remove the most weakly bound electron from the rest of the radical.

A disturbing conclusion

Not only was the attempt to reproduce the values measured unsuccessful, but other inconsistencies led Chen to suspect foul play. He called upon ETH Zürich's executive board to appoint a scientific board of inquiry to clarify the irregularities at the beginning of January 2009. At the same time, he and his co-authors withdrew the first publication.

Five internationally renowned professors (three external ones and two from ETH Zürich) were appointed to the commission. They scrutinized the studies in question, repeated the processes used at the time where possible and interviewed the three authors involved in the experiments: the doctoral student and postdoctoral researcher at the time and Chen.

The commission concluded that some of the data had been falsified. For example, certain diagrams involving representations of the measured spectra often contained identical patterns from static, that is technically unavoidable signals without any discernible information content. The fact that some of the noise patterns recur in an identical fashion is virtually impossible, which suggests they were added to the diagrams afterward says the final report. Moreover, repeating the experiments revealed that some of the lines apparently measured within the spectra did not actually exist.

In addition, the relevant lab books and most of the raw data for the experiments are missing, limiting the likelihood that the experiment could be successfully replicated.

Resolution

All of the people involved in the experiments categorically deny having carried out the falsifications; however, they all agree that the data were falsified.

Consequently, the second publication with the fake data was withdrawn.

At this point, the author of the doctoral thesis initially withdrew his thesis on his own accord, but retracted the withdrawal later.

ETH Zürich has postponed the planned publication of the commission's report for the time being for legal reasons associated with the doctoral thesis.

After receiving the report ETH Zürich's executive board conducted its own investigation to form its own opinion. "The commission resolved the matter objectively and I am much obliged to them in the name of ETH Zürich," says Eichler. "Unfortunately, there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications," he added.

Chen assumes responsibility

As the current vicepresident responsible for quality assurance in research, Chen felt that the incident had compromised his effectiveness, and decided to step down.

"Peter Chen is an impressive researcher and a highly valued member of our board in every respect," stresses Eichler. "We very much regret to lose such an accomplished leader, but we are happy that he'll remain in our midst as a model colleague, outstanding scientist and professor."

Paul Guinnessy

Related Links
The zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectrum of the propargyl radical, C₃H₃ Published February 2000
Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅ Published July 2000
Erratum: "Zero kinetic energy photoelectron spectra of the allyl radical, C₃H₅" [J. Chem. Phys. 113, 561 (2000)] Published July 2009

Related News stories
Senior professor resigns over falsified 'pure research' The Daily Telegraph
Research chief steps down over fake data NatureNews
Embarrassment as technology institute research chief resigns World Radio Switzerland

Daily Telegraph: The world's 'quietest' room opened its doors for the study of nanotechnology in Bristol.

The ''ultra-low vibration suite'', which cost £11m, allows scientists to manipulate atoms and molecules without the interference of environmental vibrations interrupting their work.

There is virtually no air movement inside the cutting edge laboratory, which is anchored to the rock foundation in the basement of the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre in Bristol.

The building's architecture prevents the penetration of echo and sound waves inside the building, despite its location in the Bristol city centre.

Meanwhile, its exterior panels are made from 'self-cleaning' glass, that uses nano-particles to break down dirt.

The Centre will be used for a range of experiments, from looking for solutions to greener power production to better ways to battle cancer.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

Nature News: Researchers in the United States and Europe are seeking funding so that the ice cores used to study Earth's past climate can have the same luxuriously chilly storage facilities currently enjoyed by prize tuna.

WSJ.com: To conservator Sue Ann Chui at the Getty Museum, the 518-year-old wooden panel painting on her easel is a study in the subtle science of art.

Under scrutiny at her studio, the 15th-century masterwork depicting Madonna and Child is yielding its secrets to X-ray probes, ultraviolet scans, infrared reflectograms and molecular spectroscopy. The panel painting, like many thousands of others world-wide, was severely damaged by earlier efforts to preserve it. Ms. Chui is repairing the ravages of time and good intentions, while helping to turn a dying craft of panel conservation into material science.

"This specialization is a real rarity," says George Bisacca, a leading painting conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "It is in a curious spot between science, artisan skills and artistry, requiring very complicated judgment and knowledge from lots of different fields. That's why there are so few experts."

No more than half a dozen or so restoration specialists world-wide have the expertise for such sophisticated work, and most of them are nearing retirement. The only specialist training program for panel painting conservation, located in Florence, Italy, recently shut down. "It has created this vacuum in expertise," says Getty Conservation Institute scientist Alan Phenix.

Various: The large number of electrical and vacuum issues effecting the Large Hadron Collider is having a trickle-down effect on both students and on researchers, some of whom are moving to Fermilab in an attempt to gather some data on the potential mass of the Higgs Boson.

Nature News reports on how a data drought is impacting students: Sara Bolognesi defended her PhD thesis last year on finding the Higgs boson based on theoretical calculations not data because of the LHC delays.

The long delays have ended the dreams of a generation of graduate students hoping to use fresh data for their theses. With no machine to deliver results, "people are doing experimental PhDs and effectively doing very little experimenting," says Will Reece, a graduate student at Imperial College London working on a detector known as LHCb. "It's a strange situation."

The New York Times's Dennis Overbye goes into more detail over the thousands of bad electrical connections that were discovered during the recent shut down to re-test the vacuum seals after last years accident.

Overbye says that CERN will announce a new schedule this week, and confirmed news that physicstoday.org reported two months ago that the collider will not now run 14 TeV collisions. Instead, due to the underperforming magnets, the collider will start operations at 8 TeV collisions.

In an e-mail exchange, Lucio Rossi, head of magnets for CERN, said that 49 magnets had lost their training in the sectors tested and that it was impossible to estimate how many in the entire collider had gone bad. He said the magnets in question had all met specifications and that the problem might stem from having sat outside for a year before they could be installed.

Related News Picks
LHC restart pushed back again
LHC restart pushed back, may not run at 14 TeV
LHC repair plan points to weaknesses in original design
Late start for Large Hadron Collider
Special focus on the Large Hadron Collider

Related Physics Today print articles
Mishap shuts down LHC until April November 2008
CERN's Fix-It Man November 2007
Multiple Problems Push LHC Start to Next Spring September 2007

2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: It took scientists more than twenty years after the first DNA sequencing technology was discovered to sequence the entire human genome; yet our own cells complete this task every time our bodies produces a daughter cell.

So to achieve the goal of real time DNA sequencing, Pacific Biosciences had the idea to spy on Mother Nature as she goes to work copying DNA. Now, the company's commercial device planned to be on the market in 2010, promises to be 20,000 times faster than current second generation technology, with turn around time of about ten minutes rather than ten days.

Chief Technology Officer Steve Turner says in four to five years, new technologies promise to rocket this technology forward even further, making it will possible to sequence an entire human genome in fifteen minutes, on a chip that costs less than 100 dollars

BBC NEWS: America's first nuclear weapons production facility has become the center of a growing tourism industry.

More than 60 years after plutonium was first produced at Hanford, Washington State, the US government is running limited visits to the site.

Many locals are proud of their heritage, but Hanford has left another legacy: massive radioactive contamination.

And now billions of dollars of President Obama's stimulus money is being spent on cleaning up what is one of the most polluted places in the US.

TwinCities.com: Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab called Homestake at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings—a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.

Scientists, politicians, and other officials gathered 22 June for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4850 feet below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize–winning physics research.

The site is ideal for experiments because its location is shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.

The deepest reaches of the mine plunge to 8000 feet below the surface. Some early geology and hydrology experiments are already under way at 4850 feet. Researchers also hope to build two deeper labs that are still awaiting funding from Congress.

"The fact that we're going to be in the Davis Cavern just tickles us pink," said Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, referring to a portion of the mine named after scientist Ray Davis Jr, who used it in the 1960s to demonstrate the existence of particles called solar neutrinos.

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.

The Bevatron's beam was finally turned off in 1993 by one of the people who built it: Edward Lofgren.

Related Physics Today articles
Bevatron Launched (1954)
During the next three years (1961)
The Bevatron Reactivated (1963)
Bevatron Shut Down 3 Months: Metal Fatigue in Alternator (1967)
Long-lived kaon shows no 2-muon decay (1971)
Two accelerators switch to nitrogen ions (1971)
Conflicting evidence for K-meson decay (1972)
Bevalac makes a successful debut (1974)
Bevalac accelerates uranium (1982)
Probing Dense Nuclear Matter in the Laboratory (1993)

CNET News: General Motors opened the doors to a battery research and development plant in Michigan on Monday, a facility the company says will accelerate its move to electric vehicles.

The Global Battery Systems Lab in Warren, Mich., will be used to test the lithium ion batteries planned for the Chevy Volt as well as other energy storage systems such as ultracapacitors, GM said.

The facility, at 33,000 square feet, is four times larger than GM's existing testing operation and will be used by 1,000 engineers, according to the company which hosted a ceremony with Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm and GM CEO Fritz Henderson.

The Register: British staff at Qinetiq, the company formed from an uneasy mixture of privatised UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) research facilities and profitable US war-tech companies, have voted to strike in protest at pay freezes and redundancies.

Prospect, which represents some 2,000 of Qinetiq's UK staff - whom it describes as "specialists" - says that a strike ballot gave a result of 72 per cent in favour of strike action after management announced a pay freeze for 2009. The union had already said its members were "outraged" after 400 British job losses were announced last month.

The Register: Hewlett Packard has confirmed that yesterday's announcement of UK job cuts will not just hit its manufacturing plant in Scotland, but also HP's research laboratories in Bristol.

The firm will not detail exactly what is happening, but emails from HP staff sent to the Register suggest as many as half its Bristol research staff could be laid off.

"According to various sources and friends, HP has at a single stroke on Thursday HALVED their R&D people based in Bristol, UK on Thursday. 3 entire labs are to be axed. Approx 70 or so positions are to be eliminated - with completion towards the end of this year," says one email.

HP announced 5700 job cuts in Europe earlier this week.

HP said: "HP Labs is streamlining its research portfolio to further sharpen its focus on creating a pipeline of high-impact innovation with a clear path to market that addresses the most important customer challenges. HP is committed to bringing breakthrough innovation to market quickly, and HP Labs will continue to play a significant role in this effort."

Physics Today: Herbert Frank York (24 November 1921-19 May 2009), an eminent nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, provided decades of advice to government on science and arms control issues, and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (1961-1964) died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego after a long illness. He was 87.

UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said, "Herb was not only a leader of UC San Diego, he also was a world leader and had a global impact. During his exceptional, long-standing career, he was the 'first' in many of the positions he held. Herb York made this campus and this world a better place. We will forever be grateful for his leadership and vision."

Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense under President Carter and one of York's closest friends, said, "Herb York's life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security. He played the leading role in creating a series of innovative and crucial institutions--a nuclear laboratory, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, a UC campus, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. In the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs. Beyond the public record, all of us who knew him as a friend appreciated his omnivorous interest in the world around him, dedication to his family, great sense of humor and zest for life; for us, the loss is both intensified and redeemed by our recognition of the model he provided."

"Herb and I have been friends since 1948 and our lives have been intertwined ever since," said Marvin Goldberger, former dean of UC San Diego's Division of Natural Sciences and former president of Caltech. "By the time Herb was only 28 years old, he had been appointed director of the Livermore Laboratory. That was the start of Herb's career of public service at the highest levels of government and academe. He was an effective voice for science within the White House and enormously effective as the first chancellor of UC San Diego."

Mark Thiemens, dean of UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences, noted "Herb is one of the most remarkable and influential scientists I have ever met. Whenever I pick up a book on the history of science policy in the United States, a history of the Manhattan Project, or a history of fundamental physics, Herb is featured prominently. He played an integral role in creating our nation's science agencies--the NSF, NASA and the Department of Energy--as well as an integral role in developing UC San Diego into a world renowned university."

Speaking for the family, York's oldest daughter, Rachel, said, "We are so grateful that Dad died in the embrace of the university he loved so very much, and was so very proud of."

UC's long association with York

York first came to the UC system in 1943 when he was recruited to join the staff of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) at Berkeley. Under the auspices of the UCRL, York was dispatched to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project, where a group of scientists designed the first atomic bomb - the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

In a memoir, York wrote that his contribution to the bomb's development had not been all that profound, but that he still felt triumphant: "Not only did we complete the project, but we ended the war."

Ending the war, or better yet, not starting one, was eventually to become a cause York advocated the better part of his life.

York received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in the same year, at the University of Rochester. At the end of World War II, York returned to UC Berkeley as a graduate student, received a doctorate in physics in 1949, stayed on as research physicist, then joined the physics department in 1951 as an assistant professor. Life in academia was short-lived, as once again he was recruited to a more urgent mission. From July 1952, to March 1958, York initiated and directed the UC Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, overseeing research programs which included development of the hydrogen bomb and other classified programs under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In March of 1958, York became the first chief scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, Washington, DC In December of that year, President Eisenhower appointed him the first director of Defense Research and Engineering, serving as civilian supervisor of missile and space research.

It was during these duties in the 1950s that York's belief that ending a war was done most effectively by not starting one sharpened, and turned him emphatically to arms control and to a nuclear test ban as a first step. "I was the only senior official who thought it (arms control and nuclear test ban) was a great idea," York later said. "Others were tolerant of it, but the majority thought it was really dumb."

York returned to academia in 1961 when UC established a campus in La Jolla. UC President Clark Kerr turned to York as someone with a solid record of administration and good rapport with the Board of Regents. York was named chancellor 17 February 1961, and assumed office in July that year.

In his slightly more than three years as UCSD chancellor, York worked with faculty committees planning to expand the campus. Though pleased with the tangible progress, York was less than gratified by the bureaucratic system of committee-based decision making and resigned in November of 1964 to return to teaching as a professor of physics, later chairing the Physics Department and serving as dean of graduate studies, 1969-1970.

An interest in arms control

York also was continuing in various capacities for the US government. He served as a member of the first General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, 1962-69; headed the US delegation to a UNESCO conference in 1965 on the application of science and technology; served as a member of the US delegation to Soviet-American Arms Control Talks, 1978-79, and served as US ambassador and chief negotiator for the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, 1979-81.

Opposition in both the United States and the Soviet Union scuttled the Geneva negotiations, and York later related his disappointment, but not surprise, saying that at that time: "The world situation just wouldn't support it."

In 1969, York started a long association with Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, by attending his first private meeting with Soviet counterparts to discuss arms control issues. "It is truly no understatement to say that Herb was one of the giants of the American national security and arms control communities," says Pugwash Executive Diretor Jeffrey Boutwell, "and few people embodied as he did the highest standards of intellectual rigor and passionate engagement for seeking what was best for our country and the world community."

Sandy Butcher, the official Pugwash historian, agrees by pointing to a 1971 quote from York, "[O]ur final goal must remain the ideal of general and complete disarmament.... Any reasonable extrapolation of history tells us that if we keep all those weapons around they will be used. While no one can say how to get from the present situation all the way to total nuclear disarmament, it is clear that throwing weapons away heads us in the right direction and building more weapons, be they MIRVs, ABMs, or SS-9s, heads us in the wrong direction. We have fussed too much and too long about fine structure. We must begin to focus on directions rather than details." (A Little Arms Control Can be a Dangerous Thing, War/Peace Report, August/September 1971, pp. 3 - 7).

Presidential Adviser

York also was adviser to six US presidents on arms and armament, and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the scientific advisory boards of the Army and the Air Force.

The scholar and university administrator again served as chancellor of UC San Diego on an interim basis from 1970 to 1972. In contrast to his first term as founding chancellor, before the first students had even been accepted, York relished the short interim chancellorship made sweeter by the fact that "we had real students, and it was a real university."

Following the second chancellorship, York taught physics and served as director of the Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs, 1973-88. In 1983 York founded and directed the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), which conducts research and seminars on conflict resolution and promotes international efforts to avoid war. In 1989 he became director emeritus.

He also served as advisor to the president of UC and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the future of the nuclear labs.

Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former UC San Diego Chancellor, said, "Herb played a key role in the development of nuclear weapons and more importantly, in defining the nation's policy on such weapons. As the first chancellor of UC San Diego he set the standard for excellence and the university's subsequent development as a great research university. His contributions at the national level and in San Diego are truly legendary."

Among his numerous awards were:

   * The 2000 Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in higher education, the highest honor bestowed by UC Berkeley's Academic Senate.

   * The 2000 Enrico Fermi Award for his efforts and contributions in nuclear deterrence and arms control agreements, presented by President Clinton in Washington DC The Fermi Award is the government's oldest science and technology award honoring lifetime achievement.

   * The 2000 Vannevar Bush Award for leadership in the arms control movement and work in nuclear energy, presented by the National Science Board, the policymaking arm of the National Science Foundation.

   * Also, the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award, 1994; the Federation of American Scientists' Public Service Award, 1993, and the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award, 1962.

York was the author of six books: Arms Control (Readings from Scientific American, 1973); The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and Superbomb (1976); Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (1978); Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to Geneva (1987); A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative (1988); and Arms and the Physicist (1994).

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sybil, whom he met at Berkeley, and three children: Rachel York, Dr. Cynthia York, David Winters, and four grandchildren.

Arrangements for a memorial service at UC San Diego are pending.

In lieu of flowers, the York family suggests donations in Herb's memory be made to the "Herb York Memorial Fund. "Donations can be made online at www.givetoucsd.ucsd.edu by indicating in the comment section Herb York Memorial Fund.

Related Links
Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader LA Times
Herbert York, 87, Top Nuclear Physicist Who Was Arms Control Advocate, Dies New York Times

Slate: Five months ago, Sheri Sangji, a young technician in a biochemistry laboratory at the University of California-Los Angeles began to transfer a tablespoon of t-butyl lithium from one container to another. T-butyl lithium is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites on contact with air, but Sheri Sangji wasn't wearing a protective lab coat--instead, she had on a flammable synthetic sweatshirt. Somehow the stuff spilled onto her clothing, and she was engulfed in flames. Sangji died from her burns 18 days later.

According to a recently completed government investigation, the fire could have been foreseen. UCLA's own safety officials had already faulted the lab on the latter issue back in October, but the problem went uncorrected.

James Kaufman, president of the Laboratory Safety Institute in Natick, Mass., estimates that accidents and injuries occur hundreds of times more frequently in academic labs than in industrial ones.

The presence of flagrant safety violations at a major research university is no surprise, says Slate's Beryl Lieff Benderly.

Since what counts in academia is publishing papers and winning grants, any change will have to start with the people who control the research money, says Benderly. Federal funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation should treat the welfare of the students, postdocs, and technicians who do the labor of American science with the same attention they afford experimental subjects and laboratory animals.

Related Physics Today article
After Serious Accident, SLAC Experiments Remain Shut Down and DOE Report Faults Lab's Safety Oversight (February 2005)

But the US$500-million plan has found one of its most difficult tasks on the surface. It has struggled to meet goals to work with local Native Americans, whose cooperation is vital to keeping the project on track. A federal review this year questioned whether DUSEL would create educational and outreach opportunities for local tribes; if not, it could face lawsuits, delays, or other major problems.

Chicago Pubic Radio: Researchers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory seem poised to answer some of the most basic questions in science. But now, the focus of high-energy physics is moving away from Chicago's western suburbs. Europe's Large Hadron Collider is expected to dwarf Fermi's collider into obsolescence. Fermilab now has to figure out how to keep up its prominence, its funding, its relevance. So scientists there are making a big pivot, training their sights on a new physics frontier.

The New York Times: Good news at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has been piling up fast in recent months. In the midst of a recession, the lab here is launching huge new projects and generating hundreds of jobs.

Associated Press: The primary US lab for renewable energy will receive $110 million in federal stimulus funds and another $83 million will go toward wind energy and other alternative power and efficiency projects, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday.

San Francisco Chronicle: After more than a decade of work and an investment of $3.5 billion, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say they have created a super laser that will enable them to build a miniature sun within the lab in the next two years.

Chicago Tribune: A University of Chicago physicist and senior administrator at Argonne National Laboratory has been named its next director. Eric Isaacs—who currently serves as Argonne's deputy laboratory director for programs—will start his new job in May, replacing current director Robert Rosner, 61.

Voice of America: A decades-old physics laboratory in the central US state of Illinois has found itself in the race to help scientists unlock the secrets of the universe. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory was conceived more than 40 years ago to explore the outer reaches of physics. A much newer atom smasher at European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, was built to make the ultimate discovery, what some call the "God article."

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.

MSNBC: New Mexico's US senators oppose the idea of moving the nation's nuclear weapons complex from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense.

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units -- the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target -- was installed on 26 January.

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007

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Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
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How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)

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Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
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Neither book endorses J. Robert Oppenheimer’s view that bombs are relatively easy to make. Both document national paths to acquiring nuclear weapons that have been rocky and dependent on the willingness of spies and politicians to divulge state secret

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996

Physics Today: CERN has confirmed that repairs to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be complete in early spring and that experiments will start up in the late summer, some three months later than they originally hoped (see PHYSICS TODAY November 2008, page 24). The LHC may also be run during 2009 at lower energies as an extra precaution. "The top priority for CERN today is to provide collision data for the experiments as soon as reasonably possible," said outgoing CERN Director General Robert Aymar.

The LHC suffered a serious setback on the 19 September when a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets caused the magnets to fail and rupture. The resulting damage in the 3 km section of the 27-km-long machine (see image. The two magnets should be perfectly aligned) also released liquid helium into the tunnel.

During the winter, a total of 53 magnet units will have to be removed from the tunnel for cleaning or repair, along with 14 short straight sections of the machine that houses some of the quadrupole magnets. According to a report released earlier today, of these, 28 of these magnet units have already been brought to the surface. The first two replacement units have been installed in the tunnel.

The current schedule foresees the final magnet being reinstalled by the end of March 2009, with the LHC being cooled down with liquid Helium and ready for powering tests by the end of June 2009. In the original schedule the LHC would be restarted in April. The vacuum pipes of entire section in which the damage occurred are also being checked for soot damage, caused by the electrical arcs that happened during the failure.

"We have a lot of work to do over the coming months," said LHC project Leader Lyn Evans, "but we now have the roadmap, the time and the competence necessary to be ready for physics by summer. We are currently in a scheduled annual shutdown until May, so we're hopeful that not too much time will be lost."

In a seminar to CERN staff earlier this week, Aymar said he was confident that the LHC's engineers have identified ways to prevent a similar incident from reoccurring in the future.

Business Week: How the famous weapons labs, Los Alamos and Sandia, are aiding corporations and spinning off startups

Now it has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline "GST: Greek Security Team."

The people responsible signed off: "We are 2600 - dont mess with us. (sic)"

The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

CERN: CERN has today announced success of the second and final test of the Large Hadron Collider’s beam synchronization systems which will allow the LHC operations team to inject the first beam into the LHC. Friday evening 22 August, a single bunch of a few particles travelled down the transfer line from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator to the LHC. After a period of optimization, one bunch was kicked up from the transfer line into the LHC beam pipe and steered counter-clockwise about 3 kilometers around the LHC.

San Francisco Chronicle: Stanford's famed high-energy physics laboratory is in a tussle with the U.S. Department of Energy over naming rights to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, better known as SLAC.

Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) will accept proposals this week for a Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), an accelerator to make fleeting nuclei never before produced outside stellar explosions. Gelbke and colleagues want to build FRIB at Michigan State's National
Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, a facility already pursuing such work with 300 employees and an annual budget of $20 million from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But researchers from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois also want to host the machine. Argonne is a DOE lab with a staff of 2800 and a $530 million budget. DOE says
it will decide by year's end.

Chicago Tribune: Through the Internet, hundreds try to unlock meaning of mysterious missive

Science: To make a new collider, physicists in Japan plan to push an existing machine to its limits. Others in Italy hope to cobble one together from old parts and a bright idea

Houston Chronicle: Oil and gas may be the prime mover in Houston's economy, but a growing wind power business is proving there's more than one way to spell "energy" in the Bayou City.

Houston is already home to a handful of major wind power project developers, including those owned by oil and gas giants BP and Shell, thanks in large part to the state's ample wind resources, renewable energy incentives created by lawmakers and competitive power markets.

And the industry blew this way again Monday when Danish powerhouse Vestas Wind Systems said it will open its first U.S. research and development facility here. The office will open in 2009 and grow to about 100 researchers by early 2010, not including support staff, with more positions likely to come.

[From Danish wind power giant to open Houston research center | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle]

Physics Today: The Department of Energy announced today that the Princeton University-based National Compact Stellarator Experiment has been canceled. The news was delivered in person by Raymond Fonck, DOE associate director for fusion energy sciences.

"In late 2006, it became clear that the NCSX construction project would not be able to meet its approved baseline total project cost of $102M or its completion date of July 2009," said Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in a statement. Since then the DOE, Princeton University, and thePrinceton Plasma Physics Laboratory have been reviewing options for the project and PPPL. They concluded that "the budget increases, schedule delays and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure," said Orbach. The new proposed cost for NCSX was $170 million and its new start date was August 2013, which would have put research at PPPL in peril, said an April 2008 Office of Science report.

"PPPL's future as a world-leading center of fusion energy and plasma sciences is more assured by a renewed focus on the successful Spherical Torus confinement concept," added Orbach. Under the existing construction proposal for NCSX, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) would have had to close, which would have had implications for US involvement in the ITER fusion project.

"The Spherical Torus is closely related to the [ITER] tokamak, and experiments planned for the next several years in the NSTX facility promise many exciting discoveries that should directly impact our ability to understand the new plasma regimes expected in ITER," says Orbach. "Proposed upgrades for [NSTX] can keep this facility at the forefront of fusion science research... well into the future."

Knoxville News Sentinel: New Scientist magazine is reporting that problems with a super-secret material manufactured at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant are what's holding up efforts to refurbish W76 warheads, which are deployed on Trident missiles.

According to the magazine's report by Rob Edwards, the material is code-named "Fogbank" and is extremely hazardous. It is reportedly produced at Y-12's new Purification Facility, a $50 million facility that was completed in mid-2005.

Meanwhile Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, is pressing Congress to accelerate plans for a feasibility study of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. Chilton says that the study is crucial to advise the incoming president next year on how best to modernize the atomic arsenal.

The New York Times: If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.

The New York Times: Scientists there say they have developed a way to produce truly carbon-neutral fuel and useful organic chemicals at large scale using water and carbon dioxide removed from the air as raw materials. There are plenty of schemes brewing to capture carbon dioxide, both directly from the atmosphere and from the stacks of power plants. All of them, for the moment, are costly or hard to envision at the billion-tons-a-year scale that would be needed to blunt the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming mainly from fuel burning.

Tri-city Herald: A couple of nuclear materials mishaps and a high-level tiff about rebidding the management contract for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory hurt the national lab operator's annual evaluation, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.

Chicago Tribune: Good budgetary news from Washington this week won't prevent layoffs of about 200 employees at Fermilab, the lab's director on Tuesday told employees who will soon be notified as to who will lose jobs.

Government Technology: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson today unveiled New Mexico's new supercomputer -- the 3rd fastest in the world. The supercomputer, named "Encanto" which means "enchanted," is housed at Intel Corp. in Rio Rancho.

Photonics.com: With federal funding for high energy physics in the US unexpectedly reduced by $94 million for 2008, officials at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) said the lab may have to lay off about 10 percent of its work force next spring(see earlier news picks such as Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off, Budget blow to US science, Federal cuts may doom Fermilab's bid for ILC). The lab also announced this week that rolling furloughs will begin Feb. 1 for all of its nearly 2000 employees. Argonne National Laboratory said the budget shortfall has shut down its neutron-scattering facility and will mean job cuts.

Daily Herald: For about a year, a team of residents, scientists and local government officials has plugged away at a task: helping Fermilab in Batavia figure out what it would take for residents to accept construction of a massive underground tube -- essentially an underground lab to study physics.

Physics Today: Fermilab Director Pier Oddone informed the laboratory's staff Thursday the implications of the proposed FY08 federal budget on the facility. Congress changed Fermilab's proposed budget from $372 million to $320 million--a cut of $52 million. The budget cuts are because of $22 billion in savings Congress had to make in order for the President not to veto the budget.

InsideBayArea.com: The Department of Energy revealed draft plans Tuesday to consolidate nuclear weapons work at eight sites, including Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, a move that could result in a 20 to 30 percent reduction in work force and the closing of 600 buildings.

ABC7: Los Alamos National Laboratory reports about 450 people have applied to voluntarily leave their jobs at the lab. Lab employees who decide to voluntarily leave had until yesterday to submit their applications. The move is in light of a $170 million shortfall in LANL's budget, brought about by budget cuts and the transfer to a new for-profit management company to run the lab. Both LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are expected to between 450-750 job cuts each over the coming year.

ABC News: Oak Ridge National Laboratory says breach could have compromised visitor information

The Associated Press: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories need tougher safety oversight to fix a recent track record that includes dozens of lapses, accidents and near misses, according to a government report released Wednesday.

Los Angeles Times: One of the nation's premier nuclear weapons labs plans to cut about 500 jobs because of rising costs stemming from a changeover in management and potential federal budget cuts.

PublicTechnology.net: Smashing protons together is very hard to do and, when it is done, 15 petabytes of data will be generated annually and stored on tape.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's largest high-energy physics research establishment and approximately half of the world's particle physicists use its facilities. It has embarked on a multi-year effort to find and observe some of the most elusive particles in sub-atomic physics. To find them, CERN is building the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world at its Geneva headquarters. This is the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider (protons belong to a class of subatomic particles called hadrons).

Photonics.com: In light of a Mars Science Laboratory budget overrun estimated at $75 million, NASA has cut off funding for some instruments, capped funding for others or eliminated them from the mission entirely. Among those no longer receiving space agency money is the ChemCam, a combination laser-telescope unit under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that is more than 90 percent complete.

Chicago Daily Southtown: In a steel warehouse on the grounds of Argonne National Laboratory, a battery in a metal case roughly the size of a filing cabinet sits wired to a computer.

Albuquerque Tribune: If Los Alamos National Laboratory were to endorse its latest law enforcement gadget with an infomercial, a booming voice might shout out the following:

"It scans, swipes, tracks GPS locations, sends data, takes pictures and even has an LED flashlight attachment."

Azom.com: The Sandia National Laboratories Pulsed Reactor (SPR) rides off into the sunset, headed toward Nevada. It leaves behind the operators who are sad to see such an important part of Sandia National Laboratories’ work and history leaving the Labs.

Chicago Tribune: A proposed $500 million particle accelerator could help it land an even bigger project

CNET: At Los Alamos National Lab, scientists are working on ways to keep the world safe from weapons of mass destruction

ABC News:

The New York Times: For physicists, this is a summer of rumors, hope and hype as rival collaborations race to capture the legendary particle known as the Higgs boson.

Santa Fe New Mexican: Airborne releases of plutonium at Los Alamos National Laboratory could be about 59 times higher than what was officially reported during the Cold War, a health scientist told the public Wednesday evening.

Chicago Tribune: Well-known scientist returns to lead push for exotic-beam facility

Santa Fe New Mexican: Investigators have found higher than expected levels of radioactive dust in homes and businesses from White Rock to Picuris Pueblo and are calling for more aggressive monitoring of airborne contaminants — a potential health risk — in the area around Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Houston Chronicle: Los Alamos National Laboratory has delivered to the federal government the first plutonium core certified for use in nuclear warheads in 18 years.

Computerworld: Several officials at the company that manages security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used unprotected e-mail networks earlier this year to share highly classified information related to the characteristics of materials used in nuclear weapons.

Albuquerque Tribune: Just about every year the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee adds money for water projects and cuts the president's budget for funding nuclear weapons and facilities and thus the budgets for New Mexico's two weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia.

The California Aggie Online: Four construction and development corporations to manage lab collectively with UC

Santa Fe New Mexican: The federal government has put the brakes on a proposed billion-dollar Los Alamos plutonium lab due to concerns over rising cost estimates and congressional skepticism.

San Francisco Chronicle: The University of California kept its $1.7 billion contract to manage Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for at least the next seven years by creating a partnership with private companies and underbidding its chief competition, defense giant Northrop Grumman.

The New York Times:
THERE’S nothing unusual about grown men gathering around wide-screen TVs to watch collisions, whether between players in cleats or on skates or between cars on a racetrack.

But a group of men viewing wide-screen monitors in a control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory the other day were rooting for very different collisions, ones made by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced rick).

Daily Press: The physics research site will offer public demonstrations Saturday, hoping that visitors find science cool.

Houston Chronicle: The names and Social Security numbers of 550 Los Alamos National Laboratory workers were posted on a Web site run by a subcontractor working on a security system for the lab.

cbs5.com: Although some activists, community members and the Tracy City Council have voiced their opposition to a proposed plan to build a national bio and agro defense facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, site 300, lab spokesman Steve Wampler said Tuesday that there is also a great deal of support for the project.

Santa Fe New Mexican: New Mexicans are very familiar with this country's leading proponent of nuclear power -- U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican from Albuquerque.

Domenici is not shy about his vision: An advanced research center at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study new technology; a fuel recycling center to take partially spent nuclear fuel and reprocess it into something that can be burned; and a burner reactor that would produce electricity from this newly processed fuel.

NPR: The cows grazing by the roads outside Geneva, Switzerland, have witnessed some pretty strange things these past few years: Trucks roll by carrying big, superconducting magnets that look like missiles, and other brightly colored pieces of scientific equipment. The pieces are all taken to warehouse-sized buildings, where they disappear down shafts that reach 300 feet into the earth.

NPR: This summer, physicists plan to throw the switch on what is arguably the largest and most complex science experiment ever conducted. An underground ring of superconducting magnets, reaching from Switzerland into France, will smash together subatomic particles at incredible force reports NPR. But a mistake carried out by Fermilab in the design of the secondary alignment magnets may delay the project by months says the Sunday Times Jonathan Leake. The delay may allow Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator discover the Higgs Boson, the holy grail of particle physics and the standard model. “Ironically, this delay could be all they need,” says one LHC researcher.

see also March 23: A look at the Large Hadron Collider

Government Executive: A group of current and former employees at the site office managing the contract for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is asking Congress to investigate health, safety, security and management problems, according to a government watchdog group.

The Daily Bruin: Some express concern over decision to develop nuclear weapon at university-managed lab

San Francisco Chronicle: The director of Lawrence Berkeley lab is pushing his scientists and industry to develop technologies to reverse climate change

BBC: Construction on a giant underground laboratory that will help take physics into a new era is reaching a major milestone.

San Francisco Chronicle: A brain trust of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists will staff the university's new Energy Biosciences Institute funded by British Petroleum, and a top plant research professor at Stanford appears likely to be selected to lead the facility.

Daily Nexus: Despite increases in facility security and program redevelopment, the University of California-managed Los Alamos National Laboratory is currently facing several threats to its funding and longevity from government officials.

Santa Fe New Mexican:
A congressional committee wants to formally study whether classified work at Los Alamos National Laboratory should be taken away and moved to other weapons labs because of security lapses at Los Alamos in recent years.

San Francisco Chronicle: With the Bush administration and Congress fighting over how to rebuild the nuclear weapons complex, one of the country's top weapons designers said he believes it is time for the United States to consider a radical shift in policy that would ultimately eliminate the nuclear arsenal.

Los Alamos Monitor: The nation's nuclear weapons chief said his agency's budget for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program would more than triple, from $27 million to $88 million, next year.

Denver Post: President Bush's 2008 budget proposes cutting funding for Colorado's National Renewable Energy Lab while pushing a 38 percent increase in programs advancing nuclear energy.

Inside Bay Area: Lawrence Livermore Laboratory would see a small cut in funding under President Bush's budget request for the Department of Energy for 2008, but most major lab programs would remain largely intact.

Chicago Maroon: University-managed Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are facing a federal funding shortfall that could severely hamper the progress of major projects, lead to employee layoffs, and prompt a month-long shutdown.

The Washington Post: Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman has fired the head of the nation's nuclear weapons program, Linton F. Brooks, because of security breaches last year at weapons facilities, including Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Washington Post: Walter Pincus reports that in a recently released declassified version of a report on U.S. nuclear capabilities completed earlier this year, the Defense Science Board reported that its task force on the subject concluded "there is a need for a national consensus on the nature and role of nuclear weapons, as well as a new approach to sustaining a reliable, safe, secure and credible nuclear stockpile."

The task force found "most Americans agree that as long as actual or potential adversaries possess or actively seek nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, the United States must maintain a deterrent to counter possible threats and support the nation's role as a global power and security partner." Beyond that, however, it found "sharp differences."

Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project of the Federation of American Scientists, who first called attention to the science board's report, described it as an effort to "resell" the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review.

Cern Courier: Researchers at the Tevatron at Fermilab have found two new heavy particles and two of their excited states. The CDF collaboration has observed the first Σb particles, made up of quark combinations uub and ddb. Until now the Λb0 (udb) was the only baryon (three quark) state containing a b quark to have been observed.

The Register: Researchers working at the FermiLab particle accelerator in the US have discovered two new kinds of particle, exotic relatives of the common-or-garden proton and neutron.

Azom: US Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Samuel W. Bodman has announced that Sandia National Laboratories is the new home of the National Laboratory Center for Solid-State Lighting Research and Development. Sandia will conduct vital solid-state lighting research and coordinate related research efforts at several other national laboratories. DOE will provide funding of $5 million for seven research projects in solid-state lighting, including $2.6 million for four Sandia projects, Bodman said. The funding comes from DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

The Register: The consortium operating the lab expects to cleave off hundreds of jobs in an effort to lower costs. The lab faces serious financial challenges under its new management, which has to account for close to $200m more in various costs than previous manager University of California (UC). The prospect of lost jobs in New Mexico has prompted local politicians to mount their soap boxes.

Los Alamos Monitor: The National Nuclear Security Administration and IBM issued separate announcements Wednesday about their $35 million first-phase project to build a new supercomputer that will attempt a sustained speed of up to a quadrillion calculations per second, otherwise known as a petaflop.

The high-performance computer to be built for Los Alamos National Laboratory will be known as the Roadrunner. It will be assembled entirely from off-the-shelf hardware and will run on a sophisticated version of open-source Linux software.

CNET: Researchers at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, face a truly immense storage challenge.

Times Leader: U of Chicago may build particle accelerator to keep up with Europe’s science.

Chicago Tribune: For more than 20 years Fermilab in Batavia has held bragging rights both impressive and arcane: It is home to the world's most powerful atomic particle accelerator, the Tevatron.

But Fermilab will lose that title next year when a new machine in Switzerland and France fires up. Moreover, with the Tevatron scheduled to shut down in 2010 it means that America's longstanding leadership in particle physics will slip away to Europe and Asia. It also signals the likely end of Fermilab and its 2,000 jobs and $315 million annual operating budget.

Science: This summer, radio astronomers will recommend a location for the planned International Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a network of 4000 radio dishes spread over an area several thousand kilometers across. SKA will be 100 times as sensitive as today's best radio telescopes. There are four sites competing to host the telescope: one in the Karoo region in South Africa, another in an arid plain in Western Australia; the third in Argentina on a high, dry plateau; the fourth is between the angular karst hills of southeastern China. The SKA's international steering committee is looking for a stable ionosphere, predictable weather, and good infrastructure. But the main priority is for the region selected to maintain radio silence, as many current radio telescope sites suffer from radio interference brought about by the expansion of urban centers.

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LA Times: Cost over runs and delays of projects managed by the National Nuclear Safety Adminstration, which manages the US nuclear weapons program and the associated Department of Energy laboratories, is upsetting some members of Congress. In particular, the National Ignition Facility at Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which jumped from $1 billion to $3.4 billion, and the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico which jumped from $10-million to $360 million are causing lawmakers to question NNSA competence. Officials from the national labs say that cost overs should have not come as a surprise considering the technically difficult nature of the two programs, and that scientific benefits for the stockpile stewardship program (which help maintains the safety and capability of the US nuclear weapons program), will outweigh any of the costs.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education: The U.S. Energy Department has issued its final notice to organizations and institutions that wish to bid on the contract to operate the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a particle-physics facility west of Chicago that has been run since its opening, in the 1960s, by the Universities Research Association, a consortium of 90 research universities in the United States and three other countries.

New Mexican: Energy Department officials want to quadruple the number of plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear bombs that can be made at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The Economist: America's most famous weapons laboratory is under new management

The New York Times: The Bell Labs building has been sold, and the public will be invited in for at least one date while it remains, which may not be much longer.

MSNBC: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay area and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are competing to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.

The New York Times: The New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times, the Associated Press, and ABC News will pay $750,000 towards the $1.65 million federal government settlement with Wen Ho Lee, a former physicist of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lee filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 1999 over an invasion of his privacy in which details about his life were leaked by the government to the media during a court case that year in which he was acused of espionage.

The New Mexican: A newly created private company officially takes over Los Alamos National Laboratory today, and congressional leaders are hopeful the lab will be open with the public and encouraging for scientists.

CNET: Steve Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, invariably leaves audiences with two impressions: Science is absolutely fascinating, and humanity is dancing on the precipice of oblivion.

The Chronicle of Higher Education: An internal review at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that the federal government, not university officials, was largely to blame for a several-year delay in investigating allegations of fraud at Lincoln Laboratory, which does research for the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Courier News: Mention the words "particle physics" and most people begin to go cross-eyed. But the study of this arcane subject has led scientists around the world to a greater understanding of how the universe is formed, what is inside an atom and what new particles are out there in space. For years, brilliant American scientists have dominated the field of particle physics and the investigations into the nature of matter, space, energy and time — the very origins of the universe itself.