Saul Perlmutter announced the Supernova Cosmology Project's evidence for a cosmological constant at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C., on January 8, 1998. On February 18 of that year, Gerson Goldhaber and Perlmutter discussed the SCP evidence at the UCLA conference on Dark Matter in Los Angeles, where Alexei Fillipenko announced similar results from the High-Z Supernova Search Team.

The internet, along with a yellow box full of electronics installed in your office building or commercial facility, is the key to saving energy and managing grid emergencies during those hot summer days when power is scarce.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory.

Biologists are developing ever more sophisticated means to characterize molecular interactions in living systems, but a study by Berkeley Lab researchers suggests that many of the interactions being detected are functionally irrelevant. Their findings show that the transcription factors that choreograph early development in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster bind to a surprisingly wide array of genes — but that much of this binding has no effect on gene expression.

The Indian state of Maharashtra is at a crossroads. Its people endure daily electricity blackouts due to a booming energy demand that far outpaces energy production. One solution is to build more coal-fired power plants, which are among the chief greenhouse-gas-emitting culprits of climate change. Another solution takes a different approach: reduce electricity demand, and the need for more power plants, by implementing energy-efficiency measures.

Every year the American Physical Society awards the Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Award to the author of the best dissertation in experimental particle physics. The 2008 award went to Jedrzej (Jed) Biesiada, a Chamberlain Fellow in the Physics Division at Berkeley Lab, who earned his doctorate from Princeton University with a thesis on penguins.

Imagine watching a novel nanostructure assemble at the atomic level, electrons joining forces, atoms snapping together within millionths of a billionth of a second, the real time of chemical reactions.

Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a polymer membrane that becomes wetter as the temperature of the surrounding air increases. This one-of-a-kind material — as unlikely as clothes that come out of the dryer wetter than when they went in — has the potential to increase the efficiency of polymer electrolyte fuel cells, which are being developed as a nonpolluting way to power cars and other applications.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the discovery of dark energy, Science@Berkeley Lab presents a capsule history, in two parts, of the Supernova Cosmology Project's pioneering efforts to measure the expansion rate of the universe using Type Ia supernovae as standard candles. A subsequent issue will look at new proposals for studying the nature of dark energy.

Marco Battaglia of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division and UC Berkeley's Department of Physics heads the Lab's program to develop a vertex detector for the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), in collaboration with partners at the University of Padua and the University of Turin. Peter Denes has worked with numerous detector applications, both in the Engineering Division, where he was Deputy Director for electronics, software, and instrumentation, and at the Advanced Light Source, where he recently became Deputy for Engineering. Not long ago the two men discovered they had a common interest: a new kind of electronic device called a silicon-on-insulator chip, or SOI.

"May you live in interesting times," goes the (apocryphal) Chinese curse — but interesting times can also bring benefits. For Tamas Torok, a microbiologist in the Life Sciences Division whose search for extremophiles and other novel organisms has led him to investigate such inhospitable environments as the below-freezing depths of Lake Baikal, the geysers and mudpots of the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the Chernobyl exclusion zone — not to mention areas more challenging to humans than to microbes, like war-torn Kosovo — the summer of 2007 was interesting indeed.

A mother's work is never done, but who knew it started this early? Long before mom applies band-aids to scraped knees, she's tasked with repairing DNA breaks, in the fertilized egg, which were passed on by dad. Now, Berkeley Lab scientists have pinpointed the genes that regulate this first foray into motherly care.

Graphene, a form of carbon whose existence was thought to be impossible until it was actually made in 2004, holds the promise of a new generation of faster, smaller, cheaper, and more durable computer chips. However, before graphene can be engineered into transistors or other electronic devices, a gap must be introduced into the electronic band structure of its two-dimensional crystal. This has now been done, by a multi-institutional collaboration under the leadership of researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California at Berkeley.

In recent studies of a protein named RAD51AP1, researchers in Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division and their colleagues at Yale University have discovered how an important cog in the machinery of DNA repair helps promote the vital biological process known as homologous recombination, which is essential for maintaining intact genomes and indispensable for tumor suppression in humans.

The first item is by Katie Yurkewicz, Ph.D. in nuclear physics, who handles press and public inquiries for United States participation in the Large Hadron Collider (US/LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. Following her story is Science@Berkeley Lab's take on the Lab's participation in the LHC magnet upgrade project, first published in our inhouse magazine, Today at Berkeley Lab.

Magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, is synonymous with huge doughnut-shaped machines, loud scary noises, and signs that warn of magnetic fields so powerful patients must remove watches, jewelry, and all other metallic belongings before a scan. A far less intimidating alternative is in the offing with recent advances made by chemist Alex Pines — one of the world's foremost authorities on MRI and its sibling, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) — and his celebrated "Pinenuts" research group.

Flat-panel TV enthusiasts are awaiting the day when field-emission devices (FEDs) based on nanosized electron emitters can replace current liquid-crystal display and plasma technologies. FEDs hold forth the promise of sharper images, wider fields of view, and substantially lower power consumption. Techno-pundits have predicted that carbon nanotubes will serve as the electron emitters for FED technology, but there's a new kid on the block — diamondoids!

A mystery surrounding tubulin, the protein that plays a crucial role in the passing of genetic material from a parent cell to daughter cells, has been at least partially solved. A team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers has shown that fibers of tubulin — called microtubules — interact with the complex of proteins known as the kinetochore and cause the kinetochore to assemble a ring around these fibers.

The BATT Program — Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies — is a $6 million program of the Department of Energy's Office of FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies, which is developing a new generation of batteries for use in electric, hybrid-electric, and plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles. Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) assists DOE in managing BATT Program research at Berkeley Lab and other national labs, universities, and private companies.

Employees of The New York Times Company (The Times) began occupying their new headquarters on the west side of Manhattan in mid-2007. Three years before this milestone, The Times's facility team had approached building scientists at Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), looking for help. They were searching for reliable and affordable technologies, not yet available in the marketplace, to regulate daylight in the new building.

Tomorrow's nanosized machines may share something in common with the workhorses of yesteryear. A team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientists have developed a four-legged molecule that moves up and down like a tiny piston, powered only by a beam of light.

Plants and some bacteria convert solar energy to chemical energy super-efficiently, in almost no time. The secret, only recently discovered by scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, depends on quantum mechanics. Further research reveals that one of the quantum world's eeriest phenomena, long-lived quantum entanglement, is fundamental to photosynthesis.

Humans have already triggered global warming that will continue for centuries. Avoiding disaster demands the best mix of conservation, alternative energy sources, carbon sequestration, and other mitigation strategies. The right choices may crucially depend on better climate models, based on better climate science.

Scientists can embed harmless silicon nanowires in living cells; soon they may be able to wire cells together and connect them to external sensors and other electronic devices. On the horizon: sending genetic instructions to organelles inside the cell.

It's name, Wild, is pronounced Vilt. But when it comes to the stuff Comet Wild 2 is made of, especially its peculiar mix of high-temperature minerals and volatile carbon- containing compounds, "wild" is the word. New studies underline the far-flung origins of the Solar System.  

Atoms and molecules are eager to tell all about themselves to those who speak their language, and nuclear magnetic resonance is the lingua franca of the atomic world. Nobody speaks it better than chemist Alex Pines. Beginning a new S@BL series on Pines and his postdocs and grad students, the Pinenuts, highlighting their growing list of accomplishments in the field.

Research ranges from modelers' perfection to manufacturers' reality at the new FabLab, investigating Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies; the goal is to understand why some battery materials work better than others.

Perchlorate is a common contaminant of drinking water that poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and newborns. Now researchers can get rid of perchlorates without using chemicals.

Check out the pdfs on file in S@BL Selects. If you don't see the article you need, ask us to make it for you.