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