UC Irvine Researchers Claim to Have Greatly Increased Lithium Ion Battery Life Times (over 100k cycles)

100k Cycles and Beyond: Extraordinary Cycle Stability for MnO2 Nanowires Imparted by a Gel Electrolyte

Authors:

Thai et al

Abstract:

We demonstrate reversible cycle stability for up to 200 000 cycles with 94–96% average Coulombic efficiency for symmetrical δ-MnO2 nanowire capacitors operating across a 1.2 V voltage window in a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) gel electrolyte. The nanowires investigated here have a Au@δ-MnO2 core@shell architecture in which a central gold nanowire current collector is surrounded by an electrodeposited layer of δ-MnO2 that has a thickness of between 143 and 300 nm. Identical capacitors operating in the absence of PMMA (propylene carbonate (PC), 1.0 M LiClO4) show dramatically reduced cycle stabilities ranging from 2000 to 8000 cycles. In the liquid PC electrolyte, the δ-MnO2 shell fractures, delaminates, and separates from the gold nanowire current collector. These deleterious processes are not observed in the PMMA electrolyte.

BRETT: Berkeley Robot for the Elimination of Tedious Tasks

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn, marking a major milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.

They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks -- putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more -- without pre-programmed details about its surroundings.

"What we're reporting on here is a new approach to empowering a robot to learn," said Professor Pieter Abbeel in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "The key is that when a robot is faced with something new, we won't have to reprogram it. The exact same software, which encodes how the robot can learn, was used to allow the robot to learn all the different tasks we gave it."

Robopoclypse now.  ;)

link.

Google Attempting to Build Quantum Computers With UC Santa Barbara Team

Google Inc. (GOOG:US) is broadening efforts to create its own cutting-edge computer technology, seeking to use more artificial intelligence in designs that could someday speed up its services.

The company yesterday unveiled a hardware initiative to develop and build processors for its Quantum Artificial Intelligence group, which focuses on technology capable of super-fast calculations based on principles of quantum mechanics. A research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara is joining the initiative, Mountain View, California-based Google said on its research blog.

Google, which spent (GOOGL:US) almost $8 billion on research and development last year, is investing in fresh computing ideas as it looks to keep the lead in markets such as Internet search and online advertising. Quantum technology is seen by some in the technology industry as a transformative way for computers to analyze vast amounts of data. Such advances would be especially useful in Google’s main businesses, as well as newer projects like Web-connected devices and cars.
Story: Defending Against Hackers of the Future

“With an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs,” the company said on its blog.

link.

A Video of LBNL Developed Electronic Skin

Chemical Reaction, Atom by Atom, Bond by Bond

When Felix Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to develop nanostructures made of graphene using a new, controlled approach to chemical reactions, the first result was a surprise: spectacular images of individual carbon atoms and the bonds between them.

“We weren’t thinking about making beautiful images; the reactions themselves were the goal,” says Fischer, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division (MSD) and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. “But to really see what was happening at the single-atom level we had to use a uniquely sensitive atomic force microscope in Michael Crommie’s laboratory.” Crommie is an MSD scientist and a professor of physics at UC Berkeley.

What the microscope showed the researchers, says Fischer, “was amazing.” The specific outcomes of the reaction were themselves unexpected, but the visual evidence was even more so. “Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction,” Fischer says.

The researchers report their results online in the May 30, 2013 edition of Science Express.

Livermore and UC Santa Cruz Develop Carbon Sequestration Technique In Lab Which Helps De-Acidify Ocean Water

Lawrence Livermore scientists have discovered and demonstrated a new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while generating carbon-negative hydrogen and producing alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification.

The team demonstrated, at a laboratory scale, a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution while producing hydrogen fuel and other gases. The resulting electrolyte solution was shown to be significantly elevated in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2.

Further, the researchers suggest that the carbonate and bicarbonate produced in the process could be used to mitigate ongoing ocean acidification, similar to how an Alka Seltzer neutralizes excess acid in the stomach.

"We not only found a way to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing valuable H2, we also suggest that we can help save marine ecosystems with this new technique," said Greg Rau, an LLNL visiting scientist, senior scientist at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of a paper appearing this week (May 27) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, a significant fraction is passively taken up by the ocean forming carbonic acid that makes the ocean more acidic. This acidification has been shown to be harmful to many species of marine life, especially corals and shellfish. By the middle of this century, the globe will likely warm by at least 2 degrees Celsius and the oceans will experience a more than 60 percent increase in acidity relative to pre-industrial levels. The alkaline solution generated by the new process could be added to the ocean to help neutralize this acid and help offset its effects on marine biota. However, further research is needed, the authors said.

"When powered by renewable electricity and consuming globally abundant minerals and saline solutions, such systems at scale might provide a relatively efficient, high-capacity means to consume and store excess atmospheric CO2 as environmentally beneficial seawater bicarbonate or carbonate," Rau said. "But the process also would produce a carbon-negative 'super green' fuel or chemical feedstock in the form of hydrogen."

Most previously described chemical methods of atmospheric carbon dioxide capture and storage are costly, using thermal/mechanical procedures to concentrate molecular CO2 from the air while recycling reagents, a process that is cumbersome, inefficient and expensive.

"Our process avoids most of these issues by not requiring CO2 to be concentrated from air and stored in a molecular form, pointing the way to more cost-effective, environmentally beneficial, and safer air CO2 management with added benefits of renewable hydrogen fuel production and ocean alkalinity addition," Rau said.

Interesting.  Will it scale and deal with real world scenarios?  It almost sounds too good to be true...

The Son on Cal Day with Mini Robots

Newly Found Natural Protein Helps Block Viruses, Including HIV

A team of UCLA-led researchers has identified a protein with broad virus-fighting properties that potentially could be used as a weapon against deadly human pathogenic viruses such as HIV, Ebola, Rift Valley Fever, Nipah and others designated "priority pathogens" for national biosecurity purposes by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

In a study published in the January issue of the journal Immunity, the researchers describe the novel antiviral property of the protein, cholesterol-25-hydroxylase (CH25H), an enzyme that converts cholesterol to an oxysterol called 25-hydroxycholesterol (25HC), which can permeate a cell's wall and block a virus from getting in.

Interestingly, the CH25H enzyme is activated by interferon, an essential antiviral cell-signaling protein produced in the body, said lead author Su-Yang Liu, a student in the department of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

"Antiviral genes have been hard to apply for therapeutic purposes because it is difficult to express genes in cells," said Liu, who performed the study with principal investigator Genhong Cheng, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics. "CH25H, however, produces a natural, soluble oxysterol that can be synthesized and administered.

"Also, our initial studies showing that 25HC can inhibit HIV growth in vivo should prompt further study into membrane-modifying cholesterols that inhibit viruses," he added.

The discovery is particularly relevant to efforts to develop broad-spectrum antivirals against an increasing number of merging viral pathogens, Liu said.

Working with Jerome Zack, a professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and an associate director of the UCLA AIDS Institute, the researchers initially found that 25HC dramatically inhibited HIV in cell cultures. Next, they administered 25HC in mice implanted with human tissues and found that it significantly reduced their HIV load within seven days. The 25HC also reversed the T-cell depletion caused by HIV.

K-Pg Transition Dated within 11,000 Years. Chicxulub Still Guilty

The demise of the dinosaurs is the world's ultimate whodunit. Was it a comet or asteroid impact? Volcanic eruptions? Climate change?

In an attempt to resolve the issue, scientists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have now determined the most precise dates yet for the dinosaur extinction 66 million years ago and for the well-known impact that occurred around the same time.

The dates are so close, the researchers say, that they now believe the comet or asteroid, if not wholly responsible for the global extinction, at least dealt the dinosaurs their death blow.

"The impact was clearly the final straw that pushed Earth past the tipping point," said Paul Renne, BGC director and UC Berkeley professor in residence of earth and planetary science. "We have shown that these events are synchronous to within a gnat's eyebrow, and therefore the impact clearly played a major role in extinctions, but it probably wasn't just the impact."

The revised dates clear up lingering confusion over whether the impact actually occurred before or after the extinction, which was characterized by the almost overnight disappearance from the fossil record of land-based dinosaurs and many ocean creatures. The new date for the impact – 66,038,000 years ago – is the same within error limits as the date of the extinction, said Renne, making the events simultaneous.

He and his colleagues will report their findings in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science.

The extinction of the dinosaurs was first linked to a comet or asteroid impact in 1980 by the late UC Berkeley Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez and his son, Walter, who is a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of earth and planetary science. A 110-mile-wide crater in the Caribbean off the Yucatan coast of Mexico is presumed to be the result of that impact. Called Chicxulub (cheek'-she-loob), the crater is thought to have been excavated by an object six miles across that threw into the atmosphere debris still found around the globe as glassy spheres or tektites, shocked quartz and a layer of iridium-enriched dust.

Renne decided last year to re-date the dinosaur extinction, which occurred at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods – the KT boundary – after recalibrating the 20-year-old accepted date and discovering that it now occurred 180,000 years BEFORE the impact. That earlier date was obtained in 1993 by BGC researchers using the same argon-argon method, which relies on the decay rate of a radioactive isotope of potassium.

"Everybody had always looked at the age for the KT boundary and compared it with the ages that we had gotten for the tektites and the melt rock from the Chicxulub crater and said, 'Ooh yeah, this is pretty much the same age,'" Renne said. "But they are not. They differ by 180,000 years, actually. So, from simply this esoteric calibration issue, I started to realize, 'Wow, there is a real problem here.'"

"Accurately dating the major Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, including that of the dinosaurs, has been controversial," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

Renne and his BGC colleagues dated tektites from Haiti, analyzing them using a recalibrated argon-argon technique to determine how long ago the impact occurred. The tektite results agreed with recalibrated previous data but were more precise. They did the same for altered volcanic ash collected from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, the source of many dinosaur fossils and one of the best sites to study the change in fossils from before and after the extinction.

The new extinction date is precise to within 11,000 years.

Lab Scientists Discover Inexpensive Catalyst for H2 Production

Hydrogen would command a key role in future renewable energy technologies, experts agree, if a relatively cheap, efficient and carbon-neutral means of producing it can be developed. An important step towards this elusive goal has been taken by a team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley. The team has discovered an inexpensive metal catalyst that can effectively generate hydrogen gas from water.

"Our new proton reduction catalyst is based on a molybdenum-oxo metal complex that is about 70 times cheaper than platinum, today's most widely used metal catalyst for splitting the water molecule," said Hemamala Karunadasa, one of the co-discoverers of this complex. "In addition, our catalyst does not require organic additives, and can operate in neutral water, even if it is dirty, and can operate in sea water, the most abundant source of hydrogen on earth and a natural electrolyte. These qualities make our catalyst ideal for renewable energy and sustainable chemistry."

Karunadasa holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Chemical Sciences Division and UC Berkeley's Chemistry Department. She is the lead author of a paper describing this work that appears in the April 29, 2010 issue of the journal Nature, titled "A molecular molybdenum-oxo catalyst for generating hydrogen from water." Co-authors of this paper were Christopher Chang and Jeffrey Long, who also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.

No time...

I wonder how much this effects the energy requirements though for its production.

NASA, USN, UC, etc Make Thermal Recharging Unmanned Submarine

NASA, U.S. Navy and university researchers have successfully demonstrated the first robotic underwater vehicle to be powered entirely by the natural temperature differences found in varying depths of the ocean.

The new technology, found on an undersea robot called the Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC), is scalable for use on most other robotic oceanographic vehicles, NASA said.

The energy-reaping technology could usher in a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles capable of virtually indefinite ocean monitoring for climate and marine animal studies, exploration and surveillance.

The performance of underwater robotic vehicles has traditionally been limited by power considerations. SOLO-TREC, with its novel thermal recharging engine, might offer a way around this problem.

"People have long dreamed of a machine that produces more energy than it consumes and runs indefinitely," Jack Jones, a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) principal engineer in Pasadena, Calif. and SOLO-TREC co-principal investigator, said in a statement.

"While not a true perpetual motion machine, since we actually consume some environmental energy, the prototype system demonstrated by JPL and its partners can continuously monitor the ocean without a limit on its lifetime imposed by energy supply," Jones said.

The 183-pound (84-kilogram) SOLO-TREC prototype was tested and deployed by a joint JPL and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego team on Nov. 30, 2009, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. The three-month test wrapped up last month.

no time. :(

UC, Caltech, Canada, Japan Talking to China about 30m Hawaiian Telescope

Astronomers from China and the United States may cooperate on building the world's largest telescope aimed at providing deeper insight into the very early stages of the universe, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday.

The Thirty-Meter-Telescope (TMT), conceived and headed by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), is expected to be completed in 2019, the official Chinese news agency said.

"It is a big undertaking and it will define the future of astronomy and astrophysics for about 60 or 70 years, so it will automatically involve a large international community," said Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau in an interview with Xinhua.

Xinhua said the university and Caltech are talking to Chinese astronomers and scientists about cooperation on funding and technology, although no final decision has been made.

Canada and Japan have signed up to the project, which needs total financing of $1 billion, it said.

The telescope, with a mirror 30 meters in diameter, will have the sharpest view possible of the universe and will pick up images of galaxies and stars forming 13 billion light years away. It will be located on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

100 ft. BIG. No time to talk.

Berkeley Successfully Blocks LBNL/NERSC Building

The University of California will have to shelve plans for a $113 million computer research center in the hills above the Berkeley campus until a federal agency studies possible damage to Strawberry Canyon, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco issued an injunction in March prohibiting construction of the center, the possible new home of U.S. Department of Energy supercomputers, until he rules on whether a new environmental study is needed.

On Monday, Alsup said the project would be funded and controlled by the federal government and therefore is covered by federal law, which requires a government study of potential environmental harm before construction.

Although the federal government has not committed to paying for the computer center, Alsup said UC expects it to do so. He also said the Energy Department paid the salaries of employees at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - including its then-director, Steven Chu, now the U.S. energy secretary - who influenced the project's scope and budget.

Both UC and the federal agency had argued that the center, which the university would own, would be a state project. The university conducted an environmental study under California law last year and decided that constructing the building would not harm the hillside, a conclusion that opponents questioned.

Construction had been scheduled to start in March. The judge has quoted project officials as saying a further environmental report would cause a year's delay.

The proposed Computational Research and Theory Facility, a joint project of the university and the UC-operated Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, is to be built on lab property near Strawberry Canyon.

The 126,000-square-foot building would house high-performance Energy Department computers now located in a leased building in Oakland that is running out of space. It would be used by researchers and students from both the university and Lawrence Berkeley.

A group called Save Strawberry Canyon sued in July 2008, saying construction in a steep area prone to fires and virtually atop the Hayward Fault was risky. The group said the university could move at least some of the computer equipment to industrially zoned land it owns in Richmond.

*sighs*

Sad part is that we picked a spot with no native trees and whatnot. In fact, it's only Eucalyptus, iirc. We even had it designed so it'll be largely blocked from view by trees growing.

So, for sure, this will end up being not ready for our next major system. Which is an issue for a LOT of reasons, not just space, but also power and cooling for us. The really, really sad part is that it'd save a lot of power in general with the reworked set up that they have planned. oh well.

NIMBYim rules again.

I am not fond of Berkeley, local nutjob Berkeley, at all. There are actually a lot of nice people there, but there seems to be a strange attractor for those that are twits there too.

Bay Area Scientific Computing Day

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day (BASCD) is an annual informal gathering to encourage the interaction and collaboration of researchers in the fields of scientific computing and computational science/engineering from the San Francisco Bay Area. This event provides a great venue for junior researchers to present their work to the local community, and for the Bay Area scientific and computational science/engineering communities at large to interchange views on today's multidisciplinary computational challenges and state-of-the-art developments.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of BASCD. For this occasion, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which organized the first BASCD in 2000, will host the event on site on Saturday, May 9, 2009.

The event will feature presentations by researchers from institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. There will also be opportunity for poster presentations.

Organizers:

Robert Crockett
Esmond Ng

Administrative Support:

Rachel Lance
Yeen Mankin

Venue

Location: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Building 66 Auditorium
Date: Saturday, May 9, 2009

Program Agenda

Current Speakers:

* Jim Bremer (UC Davis), "Efficient Discretization of Boundary Integral Equations on Domains with Corners"
* Anwei Chai (Stanford University), "Compressed Sensing and Imaging: A Comparative Study"
* Mark Hoemmen (UC Berkeley), "Communication-avoiding iterative methods"
* Nicole Lemaster (Sandia Lab), "Adaptive Load Balancing for Component-based PDE Solvers"
* Kamesh Madduri (LBNL), "High Performance Computing for Massive Graph Analysis"
* Chris Rycroft (LBNL), "Real-time control of mixing in dense granular flow"
* Mike Singer (LLNL), "TBA"

Poster Presentations:

Those interested in presenting a poster presentation should email Robert Crockett, rkcrockett-at-lbl-dot-gov, by the deadline of April 17. Please include title and abstract. There are a limited number of slots available, and those selected will be notified the following week.

The final agenda will be available soon.

Registration

No registration fees are required for participiation in the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

All participants of the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day must register in order to gain site access at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Go here to register.

Additional Information

Site Access

All participants must sign up at the registration page in order to visit Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and attend the Bay Area Scientific Computing Day.

Directions

The Bay Area Scientific Computing Day will be held in Building 66 Auditorium, which is located at the east end of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Building 66 is easily accessible from the Strawberry Canyon Gate. A map of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is available.

General information on directions to Lawrence Berkeley National can be found at http://www.lbl.gov/Workplace/Transportation.html.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from I-80: Click here for directions from Google Map.

To get to the Strawberry Canyon Gate from CA-24: Click here for directions from Google Map.

Weather in Berkeley

Current weather information and forecast can be found at http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/Berkeley.html.

Previous Bay Area Scientific Computing Days

2000 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2001 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2002 - Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore
2003 - University of San Francisco
2004 - Stanford University
2005 - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
2006 - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
2007 - Stanford University
2008 - University of California, Berkeley

A nontrivial amount is HPC. I will probably not be attending because of Team Phoenicia testing, but I strongly encourage people to do so. If you want to network into the HPC/scientific computing world. this is one of the good ways to do so.

Link in the title like always.

Tinkered Virus 'Cured' Cystic Fibrosis in Lab

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Iowa have turned a relatively benign virus into a highly infectious form that is ideal as a carrier for gene therapy.

In its first gene therapy test, it completely cured human cystic fibrosis lung tissue in culture.

This success with the benign adeno-associated virus (AAV), published this week in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, overcomes a major problem of earlier virus-based gene therapy for cystic fibrosis, and sets the stage for tests in advanced animal models of the disease.

"I think it is worthwhile thinking about clinical therapy at the levels of infection we are achieving," said coauthor David Schaffer, professor of chemical engineering at UC Berkeley.

A new pig model of cystic fibrosis developed last year by Schaffer's colleague, pulmonologist Joseph Zabner of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City, will provide a key test of the virus as a carrier of a gene to replace the mutated gene responsible for the disease.

"If we are able to show that efficient gene transfer can result in gene therapy, if we can cure the lung disease of pigs that have been genetically engineered to have cystic fibrosis lung disease, we should have a real chance of curing cystic fibrosis in humans," Zabner said in an e-mail.

Schaffer's lab is collaborating with groups elsewhere to adapt the virus to gene therapy for other diseases, including Alzheimer's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease).

"Both of those are situations where improvements in the properties of the vehicle can have a significant impact on the success of the therapy,"
Schaffer said.

I've always felt that gene therapy was being undersold while stem cells have been waaaaaaaaaaaay oversold. There is SOOOO much potential for, well, cures from lots of nasty diseases that are genetic in nature that stem cells are only patching...at best.

Besides, stem cells can and do cause cancer too. GT also has less squicky bits morally, too, fora lot of people. Oh wait, we're still messing with God's work. Doh.

That's just me. More money for gene therapy!

UC Berkeley Energy Symposium

Just. Not. Right.

A college class based entirely around Blizzard's real-time strategy game StarCraft has opened at UC Berkeley, according to a course listing found by StarCraft Wire.

The class will begin with a lecture on topics "from the viewpoint of pure theory to the more computational aspects of how exactly battles are conducted." Following the lecture, replays of students' battles will be "analyzed," and "homework" will be assigned.

(o.O)

While fun, ummm, does this really need to be a class?

SCHWEEEET! Congratz, Dr Chu!

Life's been a mess here due tot he fact that Lyuda's PT has been in the fscking shop for the last week. The shop, the dealer really, has blown multiple turbochargers. I'm about to go rain down hell upon them in person, but while I have been so preoccupied with my personal problems, they slipped a fast one past me.

President-Elect Obama has selected my boss' boss' boss, Steve Chu, to be the Secretary of Energy. Because the Director's Page is likely to be updated with a replacement in the not too distant future, here's a small grab of his bio there:

Chu’s own research has resulted in numerous awards, including the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light. He did the work that led to the prize while at AT&T Bell Laboratories, from 1978-87; in 1987 he joined Stanford University as a professor in the Physics and Applied Physics Departments and was a highly decorated scientist, teacher, and administrator there until he accepted the directorship of Berkeley Lab.

Chu has published more than 220 scientific papers and is a fellow or member of the world’s leading scientific academies. He serves on numerous boards including the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, and the Executive Committee of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy. He has been an advisor to the directors of the National Institutes of Health and the National Nuclear Security Agency.

His undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics were from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D from UC Berkeley. He has been awarded ten honorary degrees and has held numerous visiting lectureships at universities including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the Collège de France.

Chu was born in Saint Louis, Missouri on February 2, 1948. He is married to Jean Chu, who was trained as a physicist at Oxford University and was formerly Stanford’s Dean of Admissions and the university president’s chief of staff. He has two grown sons, Geoffrey and Michael.

Oh, if the scuttlebutt is true, his siblings consider him a slacker, relatively speaking, since even though he has a PhD and a Nobel and run a lab and now is going to be a dept head of a nontrivial part of the government, he only has a single PhD. IDK if there's truth to that or not, but still an amusing rumor.

For the rest of you, he's huge into renewable energy, expect that for a major agenda item, and also synthetic biology, so look for that to be added more to the DOE's platform. Oh and he's not been a fan at all to what has been done to LANL and LLNL for management contracts. There's a slight ray of hope there, but only a slight one.

On a personal note, I've met him a few times. A very nice guy and very bright. PHD-itis is not something that has afflicted him.

Congratz, Dr Chu!

Nuthin But the Martian Rain

A new analysis of Martian soil data led by University of California, Berkeley, geoscientists suggests that there was once enough water in the planet's atmosphere for a light drizzle or dew to hit the ground, leaving tell-tale signs of its interaction with the planet's surface.

The study's conclusion breaks from the more dominant view that the liquid water that once existed during the red planet's infancy came mainly in the form of upwelling groundwater rather than rain.

To come up with their conclusions, the UC Berkeley-led researchers used published measurements of soil from Mars that were taken by various NASA missions: Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity. These five missions provided information on soil from widely distant sites surveyed between 1976 and 2006.

"By analyzing the chemistry of the planet's soil, we can derive important information about Mars' climate history," said Ronald Amundson, UC Berkeley professor of ecosystem sciences and the study's lead author. "The dominant view, put forward by many now working on the Mars missions, is that the chemistry of Mars soils is a mix of dust and rock that has accumulated over the eons, combined with impacts of upwelling groundwater, which is almost the exact opposite of any common process that forms soil on Earth. In this paper, we try to steer the discussion back by re-evaluating the Mars data using geological and hydrological principles that exist on Earth."

The final version of the study will appear online in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the journal of the International Geochemical Society, by the end of June, and in a print issue in August.

A bit early for the press release, but we'll see about the reaction.

Berkeley Tree Sitting Stupidity Coming to the End?

UC Berkeley began removing tree-sitters' gear and slicing ropes from a grove outside Memorial Stadium today, as an 18-month-long protest aimed at preventing the university from cutting down the grove neared a possible climax.

About 25 officers have cordoned off the sidewalk on Gayley Road just west of the stadium and are "telling people it's a crime scene," said Doug Buckwald, director of Save the Oaks, a group that has opposed the university's plans to clear the grove to make way for a training center that would adjoin the stadium.

Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the university, said, "We are removing gear and removing lines. We are not removing people."

Climbers hired by the university are cutting lines that run from one tree to another and are trying to remove supplies that protesters have stored in the branches, Mogulof said.

The university launched the operation one day before an Alameda County Superior Court judge is to rule on a lawsuit filed by the protesters, city and a neighborhood group seeking to block construction of the center. The sitters have occupied the grove of oaks and other trees since Dec. 1, 2006.

It is unclear how many protesters are in the branches. Buckwald estimated there were four, while Mogulof said there were as many as 11.

Mogulof said some of the tree sitters were "using their own waste as weapons."

Almost none of the protesters are students. That era has passed. It's the residents that are problem children these days. Here's a little background for those that care (oh so few of you, I know...)