Jean and William Siri

Biologist Jean Siri, Wife
Of William, Dies at 85

Jean Brandenburg Siri, who worked at Berkeley Lab between 1946 and 1952 and was the wife of the late Lab nuclear physicist William Siri, died last Friday at 85. She was a biologist in Medical Physics and overseer of the animal colony here. A pioneering environmental activist, Jean Siri was a persistent advocate for public access to East Bay parks and the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. She was also mayor of El Cerrito twice during the 1980s and a member of the East Bay Regional Park District's board of directors from 1992 until her death. Read about her life here.

Lab Scientist Featured
In Quake Forecast Story

Valeri Korneev, an earth scientist at Berkeley Lab, is among the experts featured in a USA Today feature story by John Ritter about the difficulty of predicting earthquakes 100 years after the famous 1906 San Francisco quake. Korneev’s research, studying rings of tiny, barely perceptible earthquakes clustered around quiet zones that months later became the epicenters of big earthquakes, is among the potential prediction tools mentioned. Full story. Go here to read a news release about Korneev’s work.

Scientists Will Pitch
Experiments for Old Mine
By Dirk Lammers

Scientists from around the country will gather in Lead, S.D., next month to pitch experiments to be performed thousands of feet below ground in an abandoned gold mine. South Dakota is preparing to take ownership of the Homestake Mine from Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. within a month, and that will allow officials to begin preliminary work aimed at turning a burrowed-out area 4,850 feet below the Black Hills into an underground laboratory. A program advisory committee led by Kevin Lesko, a Berkeley Lab physicist, will listen to the presentations and advise the state Science and Technology Authority. Full story.

McCurdy’s Role Mapping ‘Electron Dance’ Reported
By Lynn La

McCurdy

Imagine you could blow something up and capture every bit and piece that exploded out, then calculate where every piece was before the explosion. Although this may sound like an impossible Greek riddle, scientists did just that to a hydrogen molecule. To better understand how molecules are constructed and how they interacted with electrons, UC Davis chemistry professor (and Berkeley Lab scientist) William McCurdy and his international team of scientists blasted a photon ray at a hydrogen molecule. Full story.