Energy Institute Projects
Are Now Moving Forward

For those who've been wondering how scientists are going to spend the unprecedented $500 million given by oil giant BP to UC Berkeley, Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois for biofuels research, the answer has finally been released, a year after the nation's largest corporate-university collaboration was first announced. A team of five scientists will examine termite guts to learn more about breaking down wood into a substance that can be converted to ethanol. Another of the 50 projects approved for funding by the new Energy Biosciences Institute will similarly look into microbes in cow stomachs for better ways to break down cellulose. Full story.

Team Wins Best Paper
At Computing Symposium

Work by five Berkeley Lab researchers won the best paper award for the applications track at the annual IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), which will take place in Miami this April. Samuel Williams and Lenny Oliker of the Computational Research Division and Jonathan Carter, John Shalf, and Kathy Yelick of NERSC authored the paper “Lattice Boltzmann Simulation Optimization on Leading Multicore Platforms.” Carter, Oliker, and Shalf authored a paper that won the same best paper award at the 2007 symposium. The conference received 410 submissions for four technical tracks: algorithms, applications, architectures, and software.

Photosynthetic Secrets
Of Water Splitting

Pushkar

In plants and some bacteria an assembly of proteins called photosystem II (PSII) uses energy from light to split water into oxygen molecules, hydrogen ions, and free electrons. The heart of PSII is the manganese cluster, a tiny molecular structure incorporating four manganese ions, one calcium ion, and a number of oxygen atoms — the source of almost all the oxygen used by today's life forms. A team including Yulia Pushkar, Junko Yano, Kenneth Sauer, and Vittal Yachandra of the Physical Biosciences Division have published new details of how the still-mysterious process works, available online here, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Full story.

Crystal Bells Stay Silent
In Search for Dark Matter

CDM detector

Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment recently announced that they have regained the lead in the worldwide race to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment is now sensitive enough to hear WIMPs even if they ring the ‘bells’ of a crystal germanium detector only twice a year. So far, nothing has been heard. “We were disappointed about not seeing WIMPs this time. But the absence of background in our sample shows the power of our detectors as we enter into very interesting territory,” said CDMS co-spokesperson and Berkeley Lab physicist Bernard Sadoulet. Full story.