Mine-Dwelling Microbe
Included in Ripley's List

A paper in Science, whose co-authors include Berkeley Lab earth scientists Terry Hazen, Gary Andersen, Eoin Brodie and Todd DeSantis, provided a “strange-but-true” fact for a recent item in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. In their paper, the researchers and their collaborators describe a community of bacteria from the species known as Firmicutes that lives in a South African mine 2.8 kilometers below the earth’s surface and uses radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. The discovery expanded the realm of Earth's biosphere, the three-dimensional shell that encompasses all planetary life.

Computing Project Gets
1.5 Million INCITE Hours

Meza
Wang
Zhao

DOE Under Secretary of Science Ray Orbach yesterday announced the 2007 INCITE (Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment) program allocations. Among the projects awarded time was “Linear Scale Electronic Structure Calculations for Nanostructures,” led by Lin-Wang Wang of Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Computing Group. The project was awarded 1.5 million processor-hours on the Cray XT3 supercomputer at Oak Ridge Lab. Co-investigators are Juan Meza and Zhengji Zhao, both with the Lab's Computational Research Division. As part of the 2007 INCITE awards, seven research projects will receive nearly nine million processor hours at NERSC in 2007. The projects range from studying the behavior of a supernova to designing more energy-efficient cars. More information about the INCITE program and other awards can be found here.

Editorial: Governor's Smart Science Investment

Keeping California at the forefront of scientific and technological development is an expensive undertaking, but it's well worth the investment. At least that seemed to be Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rationale when he recently proposed investing $95 million to keep California — and the Bay Area — at the hub of such development in our nation and the world. His "Research and Innovation Initiative" would funnel state money into medical, environmental and technological research. An estimated $30 million would go to Berkeley Lab's Helios Project. The brainchild of lab director and Nobel laureate Steven Chu, it would do multifaceted research aimed at developing carbon-free forms of energy. Full editorial.

Clues to Galaxy History
In a Map of Dark Matter

The map of the universe, which astronomers have been plotting for some 20 years, reveals that the vast numbers of visible galaxies are not randomly arrayed, but rather display a breathtaking structure. Now scientists are detecting structure in the universe's dark matter — which uses gravity to herd stars into galaxies and galaxies into enormous clusters tens of millions of light-years across. The findings represent "an exciting new view of the dark universe," according to Eric Linder, an astrophysicist at Berkeley Lab. Full story. Go here to read an article Linder wrote to accompany a story on this research that ran in Nature.

'Lab on a Chip' Makes
Nature's '06 Photo List

Click for larger image

Noting "the pursuit of knowledge turns up its fair share of beauty," Nature magazine published a portfolio of stunning images produced by scientists during 2006, including one of a "lab on a chip." The chip was designed to sequence large genomes quickly and cost-effectively. The image originally was featured on the cover of the April 28, 2006 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences illustrating a paper authored by Berkeley Lab physical bioscientist Richard Mathies and other UC Berkeley colleagues. Full story. Go here to read more about Mathies' research.