Featured events- 03/10/2012 - Ton Koopman & The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir
- 02/27/2012 - Classical at the Freight: Rossini Birthday Celebration
- 02/23/2012 - Michio Kaku: Physics of the Future, How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
- 02/23/2012 - 2012: a Turning Point? And If So, Which Way?: A Talk by Robert Reich
- 02/19/2012 - Takacs Quartet
Category Archives: LBL
Lab choice may prove beneficial to Berkeley in long term
By Lance Knobel and Frances Dinkelspiel
In late September and early October, Dr. Jeff Ritterman, a member of the Richmond City Council, went down to Berkeley West Biocenter on Potter Street, one of the divisions of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Both times, Dr. Ritterman arrived before 8 am and staked out a spot in front of the entrance. As scientists came to work, Dr. Ritterman handed them a 4×6 postcard with a picture of the Richmond shoreline, signed by a resident of that city. It was a pitch for placing LBNL’s second campus in Richmond.
“I knew the decision would be important to (lab) employees,” said Dr. Ritterman, who served as head of cardiology at Kaiser Richmond for 30 years and became a city councilman in 2009. “I knew people had some concerns about Richmond and I wanted to reassure them and make an extra effort.” … Continue reading »
Breaking: Berkeley Lab chooses Richmond for 2nd campus
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected Richmond as the site for its second campus. The Lab annnounced the news this morning on its website, saying the University of California-owned Richmond Field Station site “presents the best opportunity to solve the Lab’s pressing space problems while allowing for long term growth and maintaining the 80-year tradition of close cooperation with the UC Berkeley Campus.”
Three Berkeley-connected sites were on a shortlist of six for the campus. They were: Berkeley Aquatic Park West, located in West Berkeley; Emeryville/Berkeley, (which included properties currently occupied by the Lab in Emeryville and West Berkeley); and Golden Gate Fields, spanning the cities of Berkeley and Albany.
The Lab had originally said it would announce its decision in November 2011, but revised that to “early in 2012″ in late November, saying it needed more time to fully evaluate its options. … Continue reading »
Tagged Berkeley Lab
Berkeley Lab second campus decision delayed into 2012
Cities and developers eagerly awaiting a decision on the second campus for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are going to have to wait a little longer. When the lab announced its program to find a second campus, the choice among the six shortlisted sites — three with footprints in Berkeley — was scheduled for this month. Today the lab announced it expected the decision in early 2012.
“We have been working diligently over the past months since announcing our list of finalists,” said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos in the lab’s notice of the delay. “We need a bit more time to fully evaluate our options and to confer with stakeholders in order to arrive at the best possible decision. We have a number of excellent options before us. Our goal now is to complete this phase of the process and announce a preferred site as soon as we can.” … Continue reading »
Berkeley’s Saul Perlmutter wins Nobel Prize in Physics
Update 7:30 a.m. “It’s the only reason to win a Nobel Prize,” replied Saul Perlmutter to Berkeleyside during a teleconference early this morning. The new Nobel laureate was replying to our question about when he would receive the prized NL parking permit, reserved for laureates on the Berkeley campus. He expects to pick it up today, he said.
Perlmutter said he first heard about the prize when his phone rang at 2:45 a.m. this morning. A Swedish reporter asked him, “How do you feel?” “How do I feel about what?” Perlmutter replied. Perlmutter’s wife hurried to check the web to see if the call was a hoax. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reached Perlmutter at about 3:15 a.m. with the official call.
Perlmutter said the academy had called the wrong cellphone number earlier, because one of his colleagues, a Swedish physicist, still had an old number in his contact list.
The discovery that led to the prize was described by Perlmutter as “the slowest aha moment you’ve ever heard”. He explained how he and his team spent four months sifting data from their observations of type 1a supernovae, expecting that further calibration would allow the data to plot “where we expected it to”. Instead, the data were absolutely in contradiction to “the elements of physics that we knew about”.
“This was a big shock,” Perlmutter said. … Continue reading »
Berkeley Lab holds meeting for Emeryville/Berkeley site
Tagged Berkeley Lab, second campus, Wareham Development
Berkeley sites for Lab’s second campus in the spotlight
As the Berkeley Lab rolls into town this week to hold three public meetings about a second campus, there has been a lot of speculation about which community will be the best cheerleader. The bar has already been set high: Richmond had drummers and dancers perform at its meeting, Oakland put forward its mayor, and Alameda had a packed house.
But a curious thing happened in each community meeting. Instead of the cities wooing the Lab, the Lab … Continue reading »
Berkeley bids for second Lab campus fly under the radar
Richmond is pulling out all the stops in its bid to persuade the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to build its second campus there. A full-blown, city-sponsored advertising campaign includes a billboard on I-80, lawn signs for residents’ front yards and “Richmond (Heart) LBNL” buttons available for all to wear.
Alameda, another bidder for the site, has put $20,000 behind a “Let’s put the (Alameda) Point to work” campaign.
Three Berkeley sites are also on the Lab’s shortlist of six — but if there’s a Berkeley welcoming committee, it’s certainly not making its efforts very visible.
The main reason for that is that the three Berkeley-related bids were submitted by private companies, unlike in Richmond and Alameda where the cities signed off on the bids. … Continue reading »
Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source gets a “cool” roof
While much of the coverage of energy issues faces on big geopolitical or technological challenges (Reduce dependency on foreign oil! Make solar as cheap as coal!), some of the biggest gains in energy efficiency can come from seemingly innocent actions.
Three years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama inspired ridicule from some quarters by suggesting that checking for proper tire pressure would save as much oil as new offshore drilling could produce (turns out Obama was wrong: properly inflated tires probably save three times as much oil as new offshore drilling could produce).
Another strikingly simple approach is to encourage so-called “cool roofs”. White or reflecting roofs replacing dark roofs, can offset large amounts of carbon dioxide (a recent LBL study suggested that two years of global carbon emissions could be mitigated). The idea was pioneered by LBL’s Art Rosenfeld and Hashem Akbari, and last year Energy Secretary Steven Chu (a former director of LBL) announced new policies to implement cool roof technologies on Department of Energy facilities. … Continue reading »
Tagged Art Rosenfeld, Hashem Akbari, Steve Chu
Three Berkeley sites being considered for Lawrence Berkeley Lab second campus
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has selected six sites in six East Bay cities as the possible location of a second campus, Berkeleyside has learned.
Three of the six sites are either in Berkeley or partly in Berkeley, according to knowledgeable sources who asked not to be named. They are:
- The Richmond Field Station. The University of California already owns this land, and it is presumed to be the front runner for the second campus.
- Golden Gate Fields — This 30-acre parcel sits mainly in Albany, although a section also sits in Berkeley.
- The Goldin brothers/Jones family parcel off of Bolivar Drive near Aquatic Park in Berkeley. This 12.5 acre parcel is the site of the old American Soils property.
- A 64 acre parcel known as the Brooklyn Basin along Oakland’s waterfront.
- A portion of the old Alameda Naval Air Station in Alameda. The city has offered this land for free to the lab as a way to quick-start development of the old base.
- Wareham Development’s sites straddling Berkeley and Emeryville.
The lab received 21 proposals from eight cities interested in having the second campus. They included multiple sites in Berkeley, including the old Marchant Building, about four proposals in Oakland, one in Walnut Creek, one in Dublin, and a number in Richmond. … Continue reading »
Berkeley: more excellent than expected
We love maps on Berkeleyside, particularly when they demonstrate something that we knew in our hearts even without the data. (We also like maps that show us our preconceptions were wildly wrong. We just like maps.) So it was exciting to come across the recent research of Lutz Bornmann of Munich and Loet Leydesdorff of Amsterdam.
Bornmann and Leydesdorff undertook a study in spatial bibliometrics to determine which cities around the world have more scientific excellence than expected (you can read the entire draft paper here). Using data from Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, Bornmann and Leydesdorff compared how many research papers cities produce in three fields — physics, chemistry and psychology — and then looked at how many of those papers were in the top 10% of citations in the fields. … Continue reading »
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