The biotech industry may be stalled in the test tube, but that doesn't mean the university-industrial complex is standing idle. UC Berkeley broke ground last Friday on the $162 million Stanley Bioscience and Bioengineering Facility, a humongous research and teaching building scheduled to open in 2006. "We want to bring the whole range of disciplines to the same work space for this new science of quantitative biology," said Berkeley Lab’s Graham Fleming, a chemistry professor and director of Berkeley's Quantitative Biomedical Research Institute, or QB3. Full story.

From Distant Galaxies, News of a 'Stop-and-Go Universe'
By John Noble Wilford

ASHVILLE, May 30 — New observations of exploding stars far deeper in space, astronomers say, have produced strong evidence that the proportions of the mysterious forces dominating the universe have undergone radical change over cosmic history.

The findings, reported here at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which ended Thursday, supported the idea that once the universe was expanding at a decelerating rate but then began accelerating within the last seven billion years, scientists concluded.

The new research by Dr. John Tonry, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, and another group led by Dr. Saul Perlmutter of Berkeley Lab, confirmed the earlier surprising discovery that the universe is indeed expanding at an accelerating rate and has been for at least the last 1.2 billion years. But four supernovas, almost 7 billion light-years away, appeared to exist at a time the universe was slowing down, Dr. Tonry said. Full story.