Birgeneau

Birgeneau
Is New
Berkeley Chancellor

The University of California Regents have named University of Toronto president Robert Birgeneau as the next UC Berkeley chancellor, replacing Robert Berdahl. Birgeneau, 62, a Ph.D. in physics from Yale, is a former dean of science at MIT, worked with UC President Robert Dynes at Bell Laboratories, and is renowned for his prize-winning studies in condensed matter physics. In 1997, he chaired a DOE review of synchrotron radiation facilities that led to significant improvements at the Lab's Advanced Light Source. Outgoing Berkeley Lab director Charles Shank and director-designate Steven Chu praised the appointment. For more information, click here.

California is poised to become a global leader in clean energy with a sustainable "hydrogen economy," but only if there is strategic investment in renewable energy research and development, according to a new report published by UC Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. The researchers point out that hydrogen can be produced in many different ways with widely varying environmental and cost impacts, and that significant economic and technical hurdles to the transition to hydrogen energy need to be addressed. Full story.

Plant Enzyme Turns Thoughts to Taxol

Larabell

A synthetic peptide fashioned after a natural plant enzyme has surprised Agricultural Research Service scientists with its taxol-like ability to curtail abnormal cell growth in test tubes. Steven Huber, at the ARS Photosynthesis Research Unit, is working with Carolyn Larabell, a cell biologist at Berkeley Lab, and others for clues to increasing cellular use of carbon for seed storage products like starch, oil and protein in crops. Full story.

Service Restored
After Outages

The Lab experienced two unrelated power problems yesterday. At 10:07 a.m. a circuit breaker appears to have been tripped, affecting Calendar, Webmail, Directory and Search. All services were restored by 10:46 a.m. Another outage, starting at 2:51 p.m., left many ITSD services (including IMAP) temporarily unavailable for 9 minutes. Service has been returned to normal. ITSD is working hard to prevent these occurences in the future.