Fadeyev (left) and Haber

Physicists Help Preserve Rare Audio Treasures

Anderson

The 1995 discovery of the top quark and singer Marian Anderson's 1947 rendition of Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen may seem unrelated. But through an interagency agreement with the Library of Congress, Lab researchers Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber are taking the same technology used to study subatomic particles to help restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear. Full story.

Robotic Floats Shed
Light on Iron Hypothesis

Lam (left) and Bishop

Three robotic Carbon Explorer floats, launched by scientists from Berkeley Lab during the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX) in January and February of 2002, successfully tracked a patch of iron-fertilized plankton for many weeks through the storm-tossed waters between 50 and 60 degrees south latitude, gathering new evidence for the so-called "iron hypothesis." Research results are reported in today's issue of the journal Science. Full story.

Two special lectures and an outdoor environmental fair will be offered to Berkeley Lab employees in recognition of this year's Earth Month celebration. The schedule begins next Wednesday at noon with an auditorium talk by Patti Blasquez of the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, and continues next Friday with the lunchtime fair at the cafeteria, featuring more than 20 environmental, conservation and activity groups. On Monday, April 26, Earth Scientist Margaret Torn will give a talk on climate change in the Berkeley Public Library at 5:30 p.m. All events are free. See today's View for details.

The President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) was recently briefed on current research on the health and environmental impacts of nanomaterials, and the efforts of federal agencies to regulate them. There is "no consensus" within the scientific community about the safety of purposely-engineered nanomaterials, and the council was urged to support credible basic research, using the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) to develop terminology and standards, establish global leadership in defining the risks as a basis for labeling and regulation, and learn from social scientists about communicating risk to the public. Read the full American Institute of Physics summary here.

Information Security 'From the Ground Up'

Spurred by the chaos following the September 11 terrorist attacks, CEOs have made significant investments in security. Now, with terrorism as big a threat as ever, they're reviewing where they stand -- and finding that they still have work to do. Security outfits now sell software that organizes every piece of security data into a format a CEO can absorb at a glance. Still, "If you can't make a business case for it, then it's really hard to sell security," says Eugene Schultz, a software and organizational security expert at Berkeley Lab. Full story.