1940-49 || 1950-59 || 1960-69 || 1970-79 || 1980-89 || 1990-99 || 2000-present
Argonne Highlights: 2000-Present
2000
February 14 – Walter Zinn, the first director of Argonne National Laboratory,
dies of a massive stroke at his home in Clearwater, Fla. He was 93.
March 27 – The Argonne News reports the opening of a new
Women In Science and Technology exhibit at the Argonne Information Center. The new exhibit highlights the careers of some of Argonne's major
women scientists.
April 13 – The Heavy-Duty
Truck Engine Test Cell, dedicated to reducing
particulate emissions from diesel engines, begins operations are Argonne-East.
April 14 – Former Argonne Director Robert Sachs dies at the age of
82.
October 2 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne has been
chosen to lead the new Midwest
Center for Structural Genomics, part
of a seven-center initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health
to determine the structure of thousands of proteins.
October 9 – The Argonne News reports that the U.S. Department
of Energy has selected Argonne's
electrometallurgical process to treat
spent fuel from Experimental Breeder Reactor-II.
October 30 – The Argonne News reports that research at the
Advanced Photon Source measured extremely high level of lead in hair
samples from Ludwig von Beethoven, possibly explaining the cause of
the 19th century composer's death and the years of chronic illness that
preceded it.
November 1 – Hermann
A. Grunder becomes the ninth director of Argonne
National Laboratory.
November 17 – Argonne's Women in Science and
Technology program celebrates its 10th anniversary.
December 1 – An article in Science reports that scientists
from Argonne and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered
evidence that microbes
play a key role in the formation of mineral deposits.
December 26 – Former Argonne Director Robert Duffield dies at his home
in Norwood, Colo., at age 83.
2001
January 29 – The Argonne News reports that all the sodium
coolant has been drained from Experimental Breeder Reactor-II at
Argonne-West, marking a major milestone in demonstrating safe shutdown
of a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor.
March 26 – The Argonne News reports that the U.S. Department
of Energy has named four
Argonne inventions among DOE's 100 "best
scientific and technological accomplishments." The four are
development of the 308 nm excimer laser for surgery, development
of green solvents, the decontamination and decommissioning of Chicago
Pile-5, and the process to recover and clean flexible polyurethane
foam from automobile shredder residue.
April 23 – The High-Voltage
Electron Microscope, a national user
facility at Argonne-East, shuts down after 20 years of research.
May 18 – An article in Science Express, the Web version of Science
magazine, reports that Argonne scientists and engineers have set
a world record for most energetic beam of light from a fully operational,
mirrorless free-electron laser.
June 11 – A free
shuttle bus begins running a regular round-trip
schedule between Argonne-East and the University of Chicago.
June 28 – The annual State-of-the-Laboratory
message from Argonne
Director Hermann Grunder.
July 16 – U.S. Secretary of Energy Spenser Abraham visits Argonne-East.
September 28 – A symposium at Argonne-East celebrates the 100th
anniversary of Enrico Fermi's birth and his contributions to the
development of nuclear power.
October 1 – The U.S. Postal Service and Argonne hold an official
Second-Day Unveiling Ceremony at Argonne-East for a new
stamp featuring Enrico Fermi.
October 29 – The Argonne News reports that
four scientists from Argonne's Materials Science Division rank among
the world's 98 most
highly cited physicists from 1981-1999. The four
are George Crabtree, David Hinks, James Jorgensen and Valerii Vinokur.
November 8 – U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham visits Argonne-West.
November 10-16 – Argonne's Access
Grid is used for the first time
in a world-wide technical conference, SC Global. The Access Grid
allows scientists from around the world, including Antarctica, to
participate in SC 2001, the premier technical and industrial meeting
for computational science and high-end networking and computing.
November 19 – The Argonne News reports that 12 leading software
vendors in the United States and Japan have announced they will use
and support the Globus
Toolkit developed by Argonne and the University
of Southern California Science Institute.
2002
July 22 – President George
W. Bush visits Argonne-East.
July 29 – The Argonne News reports that the first
link has been connected in what will become the TeraGrid network, the
fastest dedicated optical research network in the world. The first
link connects Argonne with the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
August 12 – The Argonne News reports that a study in
the medical journal Military
Medicine has found Argonne's Anti-Jet-Lag
Diet to be successful at reducing jet lag in travelers
flying across several times zones. The study of 186 National Guardsmen
on a training flight found that soldier who used the Anti-Jet-Lag
Diet were 7.5 times less likely to experience jet-lag symptoms
when flying west and 16.2 times less likely when flying east.
August 23 – An article in Science reports that new
forms of ice have been discovered by scientists from Argonne, Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, the University of Guelph and the National
Research Council of Canada.
September 23 – The Argonne News reports that the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has chosen Argonne-West
to build and test radioisotope
power systems for NASA spacecraft.
October 28 – A paper in Physical Review Letters reports
that Argonne physicists, with help from colleagues and supercomputers
around the nation, have developed accurate models of the complex
forces acting on proton and neutrons in side atomic nuclei
and used them to study the structure
of light (up to 10-body) nuclei.
November 15 – The Advanced
Powertrain Research Facility is dedicated
at Argonne-East.
November 25 – An article in Physical Review Letters announces
that Argonne scientists have shown that weak
disorder on the surface of a material causes bulk disorder.
November 25 – The Argonne News reports installation
of Jazz, the laboratory's first
teraflop computer. The
Linux NetworkX Evolocity II, located at Argonne-East, will
be available for use by the entire Argonne research community.
2003
February 3 – The Argonne News reports that researchers
from Argonne and the Field Museum, Chicago, have discovered
a "surprising
new insect breathing mechanism that is similar
to lung ventilation in humans."
March 3 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne biologists
have developed a way to produce
pluripotent stem cells from
adult blood cells.
April 4 – A ribbon-cutting ceremony marks the opening
of the Laboratory Computing Resource Center and the availability
to Argonne's research community of Jazz, the laboratory's
new teraflop supercomputer.
June 23 – The Argonne News reports that the Gammasphere,
located in Argonne-East's Building 203, will appear in the
new Hollywood movie "The Hulk."
July 15 – Argonne-West's Neutron
Radiography Reactor (NRAD)
is started for the 4,000th time.
August 25 – The Argonne News reports completion of the MINOS
detector half a mile underground in a Minnesota iron mine.
The detector is part of a multi-laboratory experiment to study
neutrino oscillations.
October 6 – The Argonne News reports that the National
Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Chicago
$17 million in funding to build the Howard
T. Ricketts Laboratory,
a regional biocontainment laboratory, on the Argonne-East campus.
October 13 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne
scientist Alexei
Abrikosov will share the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theories about the behavior of matter at temperatures
near absolute zero.
October 17 – A paper in Science reports that researchers
at the Advanced Photon Source have found a way to make graphite
as hard as diamond.
December 10 – Argonne scientist Alexei Abrikosov receives
the Nobel Prize for Physics.
2004
February 1 – After nearly 54 years, Argonne-West is separated
from Argonne National Laboratory to become part of the newly
formed Idaho National Laboratory.
March 3 – An article in the Journal of the American Chemical
Society reports that Argonne scientists have discovered the
basics of using electrochemistry to control
the architecture of nanocrystals.
March 26 – Argonne Director Hermann Grunder presents the annual
State-of-the-Laboratory address.
March 29 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne's
ultra-sensitive Atom Trap Trace Analysis technique has been
used to determine for the first time the age and director of
flow of water in the Middle
East's largest underground aquifer.
May 10 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne researchers
are the first to use a new
three-dimensional technique to study
diesel engine emissions.
May 17 – The Argonne News reports that a paper by
Argonne scientists on making high-temperature superconducting
thin films is one of the "Most
Popular" papers downloaded
in the past 12 months from the Institute of Physics Publishing
Web site.
June 11 – An article in Science reports that research
by Argonne and Northern Illinois University scientists shows
that very
thin materials can still retain an electric polarization.
July 13 – An article in Structure announces that the
structure of sortase B, an enzyme found in the bacteria
that cause staph and anthrax, has been solved by a teamof scientists
from Argonne and the University of Chicago.
October 1 – An article in Physical Review Letters reports
that Argonne physicists have conducted the most precise measurement
ever of the charge
radius of the helium-6 nucleus.
October 1 – Science magazine's Editor's Choice section
discusses research conducted at Argonne's Intense Pulsed Neutron
Source that reveals for the first time the structure of a dense,
purely octahedral
glass that had eluded scientists for decades.
October 29 – The branch U.S. Post Office at Argonne-East shuts
down after 44 years.
2005
January 20 – A paper in Nature reports research conducted
at the Advanced Photon Source that examines how insect muscles
generate the power
for successful flight. (View X-ray
video of fruit fly muscles during flight: mpeg format
or.wmv format.)
March 28 – The Argonne News reports that a 1994 paper
co-written by Argonne physicists has officially achieved "renowned" status with more than 500 citations in the SPIRES-SLAC database, a
major online repository for high-energy physics papers. During
the previous four years, it has been consistently the databases'
most cited nuclear theory paper.
April 18 – Robert Rosner becomes the 10th director of Argonne
National Laboratory.
May 6 – Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman and Illinois governor
Rod Blagojevich participate in a cornerstone
ceremony for the Center for Nanoscale Materials.
2006
April 10 – The Argonne News reports that an Argonne-developed
lens has established a world
record for tiny spot size with
a hard X-ray beam.
April 19 – A huge birthday cake helps celebrate
Argonne's official 60th birthday in the Building 213 Cafeteria.
May 8 – The Argonne News reports that Argonne biologists
have identified 217 potential new
targets for anti-cancer drugs.
May 22 – The Argonne News reports that biologists
at Argonne have developed and patented a bacterial "factory" that
enables the study of membrane proteins. Essential to cellular
processes, these membrane are difficult to study because they
are not water soluble.
August 31 – The U.S. Department of Energy awards
the Argonne operating contract to a new team formed by The
University of Chicago.
1940-49 || 1950-59 || 1960-69 || 1970-79 || 1980-89 || 1990-99 || 2000-present
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