No Change in Pension, Benefits in New Contract

There has been some unfortunate confusion since last week's announcement that the University had won the competition to continue management of Berkeley Lab. There will be NO CHANGE in employee's pension and health benefits as a result of the new contract, which goes into effect June 1.

Cornell, Lab Team
For R&D Company

Yu
Walukiewicz

The Lab's Technology Transfer Department has negotiated an agreement with Cornell University that has resulted in a privately held R & D company, RoseStreet Labs, licensing solar cell technology that was jointly developed by Berkeley Lab researchers Wladyslaw Walukiewicz, Kin Man Yu, and Junqiao Wu, and by researchers at Cornell.  RoseStreet Labs is developing solar cells with potential efficiencies exceeding 55 percent that will capture the broad spectrum of the sun's energy utilizing thin film technology. Go here for more information (top story).

Nanosys Gets Patent
For Multi-Color Displays

Nanosys has announced the issuance of a U.S. Patent entitled "Electronic Displays using Optically Pumped Luminescent Semiconductor Nanocrystals." It is part of a broad set of nanotechnology patents that Nanosys has exclusively licensed from Berkeley Lab and covers electronic color displays based on an array of semiconductor nanocrystals. Go here for more information.

ALS Used to Help 'See'
Antibiotic Resistance

Staphylococcus Aureus

Using X-ray crystallography, researchers at Yale have "seen" the structural basis for antibiotic resistance to common pathogenic bacteria, facilitating design of a new class of antibiotic drugs, according to an article in Cell. In recent years, common disease-causing bacteria have increasingly become resistant to antibiotics. The research at Yale -- some of the work was conducted at the Lab's Advanced Light Source -- illuminates one of the ways that bacteria can become resistant to macrolide antibiotics. Full story.

Science Wants
To Be Free

Eisen

Publicly funded research belongs in the public domain, says Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at Berkeley Lab. Along with Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize-winning oncologist Harold Varmus, Eisen founded the Public Library of Science, which is launching three new "open access" scientific journals this year. The publishers of paid-subscription journals such as Science, Nature, and Cell aren't laughing. Go here to read a Q&A with Eisen.