The Lab’s Environment, Health and Safety Division has contracted with Prestige Optical to provide free prescription safety glasses for employees. Representatives will be at Health Services on Thursday and Friday, and throughout the month of December, for appointments. Staff should bring their current prescription. Call x6266 to make an appointment. Those in the Life Sciences Division will be contacted by their safety coordinator with further instructions on obtaining prescription safety glasses.
Go to OurSafety for more on the Lab's safety efforts.
Research News: Communities of Microbes In HumansMicrobial communities perform essential functions inside the human body, yet “when the average person hears the word ‘microbe,’ they think of a disease,” says Nikos Kyrpides of the Genomics Division, who heads the Genome Biology Program at DOE’s JGI. The Integrated Microbial Genomics with Microbiome Samples (IMG/M) database, devised by JGI and the Computational Research Division, is a major tool for metagenomics, the study of microbial communities found in nature. Now IMG/M is expanding to include the microbial communities that live in humans. More>
In The News: Scholarship May Create Next Wave of Scientists[Argus Leader] For Jose Alonso, all it took was a tour of Berkeley Lab as a high-school senior to ignite his passion for physics. Now he’s hoping to push a new generation into the study of particle physics through the development of a scholarship program for South Dakota high school and college students. Alonso retired from Berkeley Lab in 2002 after a long career there, and is currently the director of the Sanford Underground Lab in South Dakota. More>
People: Physical Biosciences Deputy Director Profiled in Protein NewsletterPaul Adams, deputy director of the Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division, recently participated in a Q&A feature for the Protein Data Bank Newsletter. In the feature, Adams discusses his PHENIX crystallographic software, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and the future of structural biology. The newsletter is published quarterly by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank. More>
Starting this month, most funding agencies that use Grants.gov will only accept applications using the Adobe Forms Application packages. To help Lab staff with this process, the Sponsored Projects Office is conducting a class on Thursday at 1:30 p.m. in Bldg. 84-318. The one-hour review will cover required and recommended software, tips on navigation, and preparing documents for upload. Principal investigators and scientists are welcome to attend. Registration is required (use code SPO0101), and an e-mail should be sent to instructor Cynthia Ernest.
Employees are invited to provide their feedback on getting to and from work by completing a survey on commuting. Answers to the survey are anonymous, but prizes will be given to a random selection of responders. The deadline for the survey has been extended to Friday, Dec 12.
A talk by Van Jones on campus this evening, sponsored by the Berkeley Energy Resources Collaborative, has been canceled. The event will most likely be rescheduled to the spring, say organizers.
In Memoriam: Loomis, Former Lawrence Assistant, VOA DirectorHenry Loomis, director of the Voice of America during the Eisenhower administration, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting during the Nixon administration and a physicist, died Nov. 2 at age 89. After World War II, Loomis did graduate work in physics at UC Berkeley, where he was an assistant to radiation laboratory director Ernest Lawrence. More>