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Coupling decades of research on energy efficiency with the interactivity of the Web,
Berkeley Lab has created a new website that can help homeowners save hundreds of dollars
per year on their energy bills. The Home Energy Saver website
allows consumers to identify which technologies will save them the most energy and money.
Answer a set of basic questions about your own house to get a customized set of
energy-saving improvements you can make.
A new thumb-sized microscope
that uses microwaves but works something like a CD-player has been invented here. Able to
measure the electrical impedance of materials with sub-micron resolution, the microscope
is of particular interest to the electronics industry. It has applications in any
situation in which there is a need to characterize a material's electrical properties as a
function of electric or magnetic fields, optical illumination, or temperature variations.
The instrument can be used on conductors and insulators as well as semiconductors.
Only about a millionth of a billionth of a meter across and spinning a
billion trillion times a second, atomic nuclei have been described as among the giddiest
systems in nature. As nuclei spin, the balance of factors is perturbed, and at very high
angular momenta nuclei may adopt odd shapes resembling peanuts, bananas, jumping jacks, or
sea urchins. Experimenters are
exploring these dizzy nuclei with the 8-pi Detector. Already, researchers have
used the detector to explore a new way of studying these unstable nuclei. Typically the
nuclei of interest are studied as fragments in the cyclotron beam, meaning they are
traveling at high velocity relative to detector, and the resulting spectrum is smeared. To
eliminate this smearing, researchers are looking at fragments that remained in the target
and decayed in place. See
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