Age Research: A New
Angle on Getting 'Old'
By Erika Check Hayden

Campisi

The Buck Institute in Novato, CA was founded on the premise that aging and disease are manifestations of the same biological processes, and they can be understood only by working across disciplines. In the 1950s, aging was thought to be intractable and there weren't a lot of ways to study it beyond simple observation. “People were essentially grinding up old and young rats” and coming up with descriptions rather than learning about mechanics, says Judith Campisi, a cellular and molecular biologist who splits her time between the Buck and the Life Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab. Full story.

Plugging the Internet
Into Clean Power
By Ben Arnoldy

Brown

They are the factories of the Internet economy. U.S. data centers and servers now consume more electricity each year than the entire state of Colorado. And while these data centers don't have smokestacks, many are spewing greenhouse gases through the electricity they burn. Sensing perils to their public image and bottom line, Google announced Tuesday it will plow $100 million into the research and development of alternative energies. Regardless of electricity supply, Google and other tech giants have serious fiscal reasons to go green. There's a huge expense for companies when computing and storage demands max out individual existing data centers. "The energy density of the servers is so high that the cooling capacity and the power capacity of existing data centers are running [out]," says Rich Brown, with Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Full story.

Researchers Receive
Physics Fellowships

Four Berkeley Lab scientists have been elected American Physical Society Fellows. They include Michael Crommie (Materials Sciences), Miguel Furman (Accelerator & Fusion Research), Augusto Macchiavelli (Nuclear Science), and Max Zolotorev (Accelerator & Fusion Research). Go here to see a complete list of fellows.

The Environment, Health and Safety Division’s Security and Emergency Operations Group is introducing an enhanced version of the Online Visitor Pass Request System.  The beta test version is available here to give the Lab community an opportunity to try out the system and provide feedback.  Instructions can be downloaded from a link provided on the log-in page (LDAP required).  The enhancements include: providing visitors with the ability to print out their own parking permits or bus passes, pre-vetting visitors for citizenship and/or birth country information, automating bus pass request procedures, and incorporating the Meeting/Conference notification form into the online system. Problems or questions should be directed to Maki Tabata (x7572)  by Friday, Dec. 10.  The online system will be available "live" on Dec. 14.

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