Today at Berkeley Lab: April 11, 2003

Friday, April 11, 2003

Today

9 a.m.
CEREMONY
Telegraph Avenue Banner
Unveiling: Saluting UC
Berkeley’s 18 Nobel Laureates
Cody’s Book Store

Noon
SEMINAR
Environmental Engineering:
Mark A. Widdowson, VT
Hudson Room, 240 Bechtel
Engineering Center

1 p.m.
SEMINAR
Scientific Computing:
Using Bitmap Indexing for
Interactive Exploration of Large
Datasets, Keshang Wu
Building 50A, Room 5132

Tomorrow

9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
CAL DAY
Berkeley campus Open House

Monday

2 p.m.
EHS SEMINAR
Building Emergency Teams
Building 48, Room 109

Soup: Clam Chowder
Origins: Roasted Chicken
Adobe Cafe: Burritos
Fresh Grille: Fresh Salmon

B'fast: 6:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.

Lunch: 11 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Full Menu

Partly cloudy

Extended Forecast

SECON level 2

More Information

Today at Berkeley Lab is online at
http://www.lbl.gov/today/

Submit items to [email protected]

Nobelists Honored
With Street Banners

Nobel Prize winners from the UC Berkeley campus and Berkeley Lab will be honored with the installation of 66 street banners that will line Telegraph Avenue, beginning today. Chancellor Robert Berdahl will unveil the new banners this morning, which pay tribute to 18 Nobel Laureates, including Ernest Lawrence and eight other Laboratory scientists. The project is a partnership between UC Berkeley and the Telegraph Business Improvement District. Full story.

Lab Assists Castlemont
In Robotics Competition

Berkeley Lab engineer Deb Hopkins and colleagues mentored students from Oakland’s Castlemont High School in the development of a robot called "The Flying Bolts." Their creation earned regional honors and is competing today and tomorrow against almost 300 other teams in the international FIRST Robotics Competition in Houston, TX. The team and their fund-raising efforts are profiled on an ABC-TV news report, which can be seen here (RealPlayer software required).





	GaN nanotubes

Gallium Nitride Nanotubes
Promising for Microcircuits
By Robert Sanders

Nanowires and carbon nanotubes, each with their pluses and minuses, are advertised as the next-generation building blocks for electronic circuits a thousand times smaller than today's semiconductor circuits. Berkeley Lab researcher and UC Berkeley chemist Peidong Yang has now fabricated a new type of nanotube, made of gallium nitride, that, he says, "captures some of the great properties from nanowires and carbon anotubes, and eliminates the not-so-good characteristics of both. Full story.

Human Genome Project
Completion To Be Hailed

Monday will mark the official completion of a monumental milestone in the history of biology – the mapping of the human genome. Berkeley Lab researchers, technicians and staff at the Joint Genome Institute played a major role in the project and will celebrate those efforts Thursday afternoon in Walnut Creek. On Monday, beginning at 8:30 a.m. (PDT), the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy will hold a joint press conference in Washington to announce the achievement. To view a live webcast of the event, go here.

UC Review Finds Weak
Internal Controls at LANL

An External Review Team brought in by the University of California to independently investigate procurement practices at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has identified various internal control weaknesses and deficiencies that increased the Lab’s vulnerability to fraud, waste and abuse. In the report publicly issued yesterday, the team, chaired by former Department of Energy Inspector General John Layton and assisted by forensic accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, recommended a number of corrective actions to Los Alamos’ procurement practices, in addition to those already implemented by UC and the Laboratory. Full story.

Construction Project
Closures Today . . .

Part of parking lot Y adjacent to buildings 80 and 80A, and to the 3rd floor of Building 2, will be closed to traffic today (except for emergency and contractor vehicles) for work on the Sitewide Water Project. Road N will be open, allowing access only to lot Y parking near Building 10. Pedestrian traffic will not be allowed through the work area.

…And Next Week

Road N next to Buildings 6 and 37 will be closed to traffic (except emergency vehicles) next Monday through Thursday due to construction activities for the Building 6 Southside Expansion project. Traffic to the Building 80 parking lot will be rerouted to Road N1. Parking spaces along Road N1 will be barricaded to allow two-way traffic. Pedestrian traffic will not be allowed through the work area.