British Petroleum's
Berkeley Biofuels Bet
By Andrew Leonard

Steve Chu, left, with BP's Koonin

A cool half a billion bucks buys a lot of smiles, and so it was last Thursday morning in Berkeley, Calif., when a gaggle of politicians, university administrators and media professionals gathered to hear an announcement establishing the Energy Biosciences Institute. The clearest message you could take from the announcement was that biofuels have hit the big time. As BP's chief scientist Steven Koonin noted, "Biology is the most rapidly advancing science" today and it will be so for decades to come. The intersection of civilization's demand for energy with the astonishing advances achieved daily in our understanding of the basic structure of living things will be one of the biggest stories of the 21st century. Full story.

Symmetry of Hydrogen
Molecule Can Be Broken

Timur Ospipov, Ali Belkacem, and Michael Prior of Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division were part of an international team of researchers who used the Advanced Light Source to demonstrate that the inversion (mirror-image) symmetry of the hydrogen molecule, the smallest and most abundant molecule in the universe, can be broken. Working with light from ALS bend magnet beamline 9.3.2, the researchers showed that the absorption of a linearly polarized photon, which itself has inversion symmetry, results in a dissociative ionization that breaks the hydrogen molecule’s perfectly symmetric ground state. The paper can be read here.

Commonwealth Club
Honors Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld

The Commonwealth Club of California will present its 19th annual Distinguished Citizens Awards on Feb. 22 at the Fairmont Hotel, focusing for the first time on people prominent in sustainable energy production. Art Rosenfeld, a California Energy Commission member who led a Nobel-prize winning group in particle physics at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab, will receive the club's Lifetime Achievement Award. Among other recipients is Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab at UC Berkeley. Full story.

Philanthropy Club
Hosts Coat Drive

Lab employees who want to donate coats to those in need are invited to drop the garments off in the lobbies of the cafeteria and Buildings 937 and 62 starting tomorrow. The coats will be given to the Bay Area Rescue Mission in Richmond. The drive is hosted by the Lab's Philanthropy Club. For more information, contact Heather Pinto (x4181).

Valentines Day Gifts
At Karats Sale Tomorrow

Need a special gift for your valentine? The folks with Karats Jewelry will have plenty to choose from when they visit the Lab tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. They will be set up in a new location: the hallway between the cafeteria and Perseverance Hall. Lab employees get a 10-percent discount and layaway is available.