From l-r, Hernandez, Hatayama, and Knight

Safety Spot Awards
Given to Employees

Environment, Health & Safety Division Director Howard Hatayama recently presented Safety Spot awards to several employees. Fifty-eight awards have been given out since the program’s inception. This year's winners include Sharon Buckley Hernandez (AFRD), and Tracy Knight, Butch Holman, Robert Kelley, James Martinez, Melanie Woods, Gustavo Al Faro, Roger Deaver, Ryan Sprague, Dave Muster, Andy Cutt, Mark Seele and Joe Kapal, all from the Facilities Division. All employees are encouraged to submit an outline of their efforts encouraging safe work practices at the Lab to their division safety coordinator, the EH&S Division online suggestion box or to [email protected] for consideration by the Safety Spot Award Committee.

Campus Dean, Lab
Scientist Heads to SMU

Ludden

Paul Ludden, dean of the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley and researcher in the Lab's Physical Biosciences Division, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University. As the University’s chief academic officer, he will oversee all aspects of academic life, ranging from admissions and faculty development to supervision of SMU’s seven schools, library system, and international programs. He will join SMU in time for the fall 2007 semester. Full story.

The IT Division has partnered with Engineering to remake the Lab’s downloads website (software.lbl.gov). The new site is easier to use with search capabilities and better platform and category organization. Software.lbl.gov requires LDAP authentication and provides users with a download history. It also includes site-licensed software (e.g. Symantec), free software that IT re-packages (e.g. Firefox) as well as open source recommendations (e.g. Gimp). In the future, the site will accommodate software for purchase, license tracking and possible RSS feed for notification when new software is released.

Governor Taps Science,
Lab in Funding Plan

Schwarzenegger

Fearful of losing the state's edge in high-tech research to other states, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced on Dec. 27 a $95 million proposal for medical, environmental and technological research that could create, among other things, the world's fastest supercomputer, and solidify the Bay Area as the nation's hot spot for high-tech innovation. All told, roughly $1 billion is in play, and a California sweep would turn the Bay Area into a global capital for supercomputing for years and do the same in alternative energy. Nearly one-third of the governor's Research and Innovation Initiative — $30 million — would go toward building a new research building for Berkeley Lab's Helios Project, the brainchild of Lab director and Nobel laureate Steve Chu. Full story.

Shotgun Sequencing
Finds Nanoorganisms

Banfield

For 11 years, UC Berkeley Professor and Berkeley Lab earth scientist Jill Banfield has collected and studied the microbes that slime the floors of mines and convert iron to acid, a common source of stream pollution around the world. Imagine her surprise, then, when research scientist Brett Baker discovered three new microbes living amidst the bacteria she thought she knew well. All three were so small - the size of large viruses - as to be virtually invisible under a microscope, and belonged to a totally new phylum of Archaea, microorganisms that have been around for billions of years. What made Baker's find possible was shotgun sequencing, a technique developed and made famous by Celera Corp., which used it to sequence the human genome in record time. Full story.

Fung

75th Symposium Videos Now Posted on Web

The video files from all presentations at the 75th anniversary scientific symposium, held in the Building 50 Auditorium on Nov. 14, are now posted on the Berkeley Lab website and available for viewing. The video clips include talks by John Heilbron, Darleane Hoffman, Paul Alivisatos, George Smoot, Don Glaser, Mina Bissell, Eddy Rubin, Jay Keasling, Inez Fung, Art Rosenfeld, Horst Simon, Saul Perlmutter, Pier Oddone, and a panel that included Lab Director Steve Chu and former directors Andy Sessler and Chuck Shank. Graham Fleming served as moderator. Go here and click on the talk title to watch (with RealPlayer software) each segment from the all-day symposium.