Shriver, left, and Akbari

Governor's Wife Learns
All About 'Cool Colors'

Governor Schwarzenegger couldn't make it to his pre-inaugural festivities highlighting clean energy technologies Thursday due to his recovery from a broken leg, but his wife Maria was there and had an opportunity to visit the exhibits on the State Capitol lawn. Above she is shown speaking with Berkeley Lab's Hashem Akbari from Environmental Energy Technologies, whose display on cool roofing colors was among several set up by the Lab for the occasion.

Comet Dust, Breast Cancer Genomes in New SABL

The latest issue of Science at Berkeley Lab — a bimonthly online publication on the Lab's latest research — includes stories on the analyzing of comet particles at the Advanced Light Source, decoding breast cancer genomes, a new path to spintronics, bug evolution, and the trustworthiness of pollution computer models. Go here to read these and other articles.

Staff Discount Tickets
For Globetrotters Show

The Harlem Globetrotters — highly skilled basketball players who demonstrate ball-handling tricks and gravity-defying dunks — will perform at Oakland's Oracle Arena on Saturday, Jan. 13, at 7:30 p.m. Lab employees can enjoy a $7 discount off the regular ticket price by going here (use BERKLAB promotional code).

Smoot's Gloomy Answer
To Question on Optimism

The World Question Center, a feature on the online publication "Edge," posits this query to the globe's leading thinkers for the upcoming year: What are you optimistic about? Among those who answered is Berkeley Lab's recent Nobel Prize winner George Smoot. His response, titled "Courage for Tomorrow Will Be Worse!" starts with this sobering thought: "A careful assessment and years of experience that show that the long-term future is most bleak — entropy will continue to increase, and a heat death (actually a misnomer as it means the degradation of usable energy in a dull cooling worthless background of chaos) is the very likely fate of the world." Go here to read his full answer.

The Air We Breathe
Loaded With Microbes

Microbe-detecting Philochip

The air you breathe is teeming with more than 1,800 kinds of bacteria, including harmless relatives of microbes associated with bioterrorist attacks, according to a new study. The finding, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will allow scientists to create a baseline against which future researchers can measure changes in bacterial populations due to factors such as climate change. The study was lead by Berkeley Lab earth scientist Gary Andersen. Full story.