Hewlett Foundation
Gift Largest Ever for Cal

UC Berkeley yesterday received the largest private gift in its history, $113 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Hewlett gift provides the campus with a major new source of endowed funds to attract and support world-class faculty and graduate students. Through a challenge grant, it will create 100 endowed chairs, permanent funds designed to keep UC Berkeley professors' salaries competitive with those at the best private schools and to recruit top graduate students. "If we lose faculty, we may still have a public university, but it won't be the same," said Paul Alivisatos, Berkeley professor and Berkeley Lab associate director. "We'll have hurt young people who have so much to gain and so much to offer." Full story. Go here for more information on the challenge grant.

Explaining Sick Feeling
After Airline Flights

That sick feeling you may experience after a long airplane flight is not all in your head. But your head may be contributing to it. Environmental health experts — including Berkeley Lab environmental energy technologist William Nazaroff — recently exposed 16 research subjects to mock flights, complete with elevated ozone levels. They found that the interaction of high ozone concentrations with oils on passengers' skin, hair and clothing produces a compound suspected of irritating nasal passages, drying out eyes and lips, and causing headaches. The offending byproducts of this interaction belong to the aldehyde family of compounds, which appear to be the culprits in workplaces stricken with "sick building syndrome." Full story.

Science and the Simpsons;
Is the Universe a Doughnut?

This article is an excerpt from Paul Halpern's book: What's Science Ever Done for Us? What the Simpsons Can Teach Us About Physics, Robots, Life and the Universe

In an episode of The Simpsons, guest star Stephen Hawking tells Homer over a beer “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is intriguing…I may have to steal it." In reality, the most reliable data on the shape of space stem from measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the cooled-down relic radiation from the Big Bang. The CMB was first discovered in the mid-1960s, but a far more detailed examination of the CMB came in the early 1990s, thanks to the Nobel Prize-winning work of John Mather and Berkeley Lab physicist George Smoot. Full excerpt.