Chu		Birgeneau

Birgeneau, Chu Hope to
'Help Each Other Out'

University of Toronto President Robert Birgeneau, recently named the next chancellor of UC Berkeley, has a long association with Steven Chu, director-designate of the UC-run Berkeley Lab. Chu, a former Stanford professor, joked at the news conference that he and Birgeneau both want something from the other at the moment. Chu said he is seeking a part-time appointment as a professor at the Berkeley campus and Birgeneau hopes to set up a laboratory at the facility Chu heads. The two might have to meet to discuss the matter in a neutral setting, Chu quipped. Full story (registration required).

The Latest Facilities
Quarterly Now Online

Lab employees can read about the demolition of the Big C Substation, an update on construction projects, and a profile of the Lab's transportation department in the latest issue of Facilities Quarterly. Go here to read the publication. Those who visit the site are invited to take an online survey to help the editors of Facilities Quarterly improve their communication efforts.

NREL Expands With
New Research Facility

Ground was broken recently on a new facility at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. The new facility will allow NREL to enhance its research on solar, hydrogen and other promising clean energy technologies. The research focus will be on photovoltaics (solar cells), but it will also enable the expansion of research capabilities in hydrogen, solid-state lighting, thin-film coatings and devices, superconductivity, electrochromic windows and nanotechnologies. Full story.

Impact of Rising CO2
Found in World Oceans

An international team of scientists has completed the first compre- hensive study of the ocean storage of carbon dioxide derived from human activity, called anthropogenic CO2, based on a decade-long survey of global ocean carbon distributions in the 1990s. "About half of the anthropogenic CO2 taken up over the last 200 years can be found in the upper 10 percent of the ocean," said Christopher Sabine, an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. "The ocean has removed 48 percent of the CO2 we have released to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and cement manufacturing." Full story.