The OurSafety website is featuring a new video, prepared by EH&S, which contains important information about how to respond to a safety audit. The video features a mock audit interview that takes place in the Molecular Foundry. It is intended to show what it's like when an auditor comes into your work area unannounced to speak with you about how you apply ISM in the workplace. The video runs 20 minutes, but you can jump to any of the five questions using a simple menu. To view the video at the OurSafety website go here.
Another step towards quantum computing – the Holy Grail of data processing and storage – was achieved when an international team of scientists that included Berkeley Lab researchers was able to successfully store and retrieve information using the nucleus of an atom. Berkeley Lab's Thomas Schenkel, Eugene Haller and Joel Ager, contributed to the research, which was reported in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature. More>
The promise of vast computational power offered by quantum computing can only be realized if researchers find a practical way to store information as quantum bits, or qubits. Long experience with manufacturing silicon devices has made silicon one of the most practical of all materials. In recent years Thomas Schenkel of AFRD and his colleagues have made significant progress toward the creation of qubits based on single ions implanted in silicon. More>
Engineers at UC Berkeley — including Berkeley Lab materials scientist Xian Zhang — are reporting a new way of creating computer chips that could revitalize optical lithography, a patterning technique that dominates modern integrated-circuits manufacturing. By combining metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of plasmons on the lens's surface with a "flying head,” researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 meters per second. More>
People: EETD’s Stadler Profiled by Austrian Science OrganizationBridges, an online publication produced by the Austrian Office of Science and Technology, features profiles on native scientists conducting research abroad. They recently interviewed Michael Stadler, who works in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. In the story, he discusses his arduous commute between Austria and the U.S., and his research for EETD’s Distributed Energy Resources Group. Go here to read the full article, which also includes an audio download.
Internet2 has produced a 12-minute video explaining the importance of advanced networking to support the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN. The LHC will be the first experiment to fully utilize the advanced capabilities of ESnet (located at Berkeley Lab), Internet2, and US LHCNet, which will connect DOE labs and university researchers across the country to the LHC data. ESnet senior scientist and advisor Bill Johnston is featured in the video. 
The most recent “Science at the Theater” talk, given by Arun Majumdar on “Buildings That Think Green,” is now available online. In the lecture, Majumdar, director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, discusses how scientists are creating a new generation of net-zero energy, carbon-neutral buildings.
Berkeley Lab is beginning the formal review and employee comment period for the proposed policy on re-employment of UC retired employees. The policy governs the re-employment of all former UC employees who have separated from University or Laboratory employment and elected monthly retirement income or a lump-sum cash-out from the University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP), and who are rehired by the University or the Laboratory. More information on this policy is available here. To comment on this change, contact [email protected] by Nov. 23.