Chu to Address State
Of the Lab on March 10

Berkeley Lab Director Steve Chu will present a “State of the Laboratory” address on Monday, March 10, at noon at the Building 50 Auditorium. In his address, Chu will discuss the impacts of the FY 08 Omnibus Appropriations bill on the Lab, the Bush Administration's FY 09 budget request and provide updates on major scientific initiatives, among other topics. His address will be simulcast to the Building 66 Auditorium.

Somerville Gives Lecture
On Cellulosic Biofuels

Arabidopsis

Berkeley Lab physical bioscientist and Director of the Energy Biosciences Institute Chris Somerville will present a talk on the “Development of Cellulosic Biofuels” today at noon in 290 Hearst Mining Building on campus. In his talk, Somerville will discuss how plants can be deployed on a large scale to capture and store solar energy, and the degree to which it may become possible to use photosynthesis for sustainable production of renewable, carbon-neutral energy. This site will be activated at noon today for a live broadcast of his talk.

Opinion Piece on Pros And Cons of Nanotech

What is nanotechnology, and what does it encompass? This week in the Los Angeles Times, Aatish Salvi and George Kimbrell debate the promises, ethical concerns, applications and government regulation of nanotechnology. In the first installment, in which the writers define the scope of nanotechnology, Salvi says the technology will help produce renewable energy, clean water, cancer cures and next-generation computing, while Kimbrell says nanoparticles can create unique and unpredictable human health and environmental risks. Full story.

Slicing Through
The Nanowedge

Fadley

Nanodevices like those that read modern hard drives consist of sandwiches of different materials whose individual layers, and the interfaces between them, are crucial to performance. At the Advanced Light Source, Chuck Fadley of the Materials Sciences Division and his colleagues have developed the "swedge" technique for penetrating below the surface to look at the chemical composition, magnetic properties, and precise electronic structures of these buried nanolayers and interfaces. Swedge scans a specially grown sample incorporating a wedge-shaped layer, using a nanometer-wavelength standing wave. Go here for recent developments at the ALS and at Germany's BESSY, and here for more on Fadley's research.

Life Scientist Comments
On Rotavirus Milestone

Glaeser

The determination of high-resolution structures of large multiprotein complexes by cryo-EM just took an important step with the publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a structure of the icosahedral "inner capsid particle" of human rotavirus by a research team at Brandeis and Harvard. A commentary on this work by Berkeley Lab life scientist Robert Glaeser in PNAS notes that the ability to build an atomic model of the viral proteins into the cryo-EM density map is at least as good as it is for the 0.38 nm-resolution X-ray crystallographic map to which it is compared. Full commentary can be found here.

Inventors Earn Nearly
$1 Million in Royalties

Royalty checks were awarded to Lab inventors on Jan. 31. Licensing income was up 11 percent this year, yielding over $965,000 of distributions for 110 scientists whose inventions and software were licensed by industry. The average distribution was $8,855, while the largest was more than $114,000. Over $2.1 million in additional licensing income will go to the Lab, primarily for research and development. Go here to see a photo of royalty check recipients.