Perlmutter

Berkeley Lab astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter was named Wednesday as a winner of the Shaw Prize, a Hong Kong-based award, which some call the "Nobel Prize of the East." The award honors significant scientific breakthroughs that have had a profound impact on mankind. Perlmutter will share the $1 million prize in astronomy with Adam Reiss of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and Brian Schmidt of Australia for "discovering that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, implying in the simplest interpretation that energy density of space is non-vanishing even in the absence of any matter and radiation." Full story.

Berkeley Lab materials scientist Robert Ritchie will address the Friends of Science group at 5:30 p.m. in Perseverance Hall today, discussing how the fracture resistance of bone degrades with age.

Nuclear Science Hosts
'Hard Probes' Meeting

On June 10, Nuclear Science Division Director James Symons welcomed more than 140 scientists from around the world to the Second International Conference on Hard and Electromagnetic Probes of High-Energy Nuclear Collisions. Co-organizers of the weeklong meeting, held at the Asilomar Conference Center on the Monterery Peninsula, were NSD's Peter Jacobs and Xin-Nian Wang. Speakers addressed a range of topics in a burgeoning field energized by experiments like those at Brookhaven's RHIC, which reproduce the extremes of heat and density in the universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. For more about hard and electromagnetic probes, go here.

A phone extension has been set up for the onsite massage therapy service that is offered for Lab employees. Staff can continue to make appointments online, but those needing same-day appointments should call x4501. If the therapists are with a client, callers can leave a message and have their call returned promptly.