This issue...
News in Brief
SciDAC
Earliest Hominid Discovery
New Lens Helps Find Cancer Tumors
Are the Digits of Pi Random?
Doubly Strange Nuclei
People
About
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This issue...
News in Brief
SciDAC
Earliest Hominid Discovery
New Lens Helps Find Cancer Tumors
Are the Digits of Pi Random?
Doubly Strange Nuclei
People
About
Subscribe Free
This issue...
News in Brief
SciDAC
Earliest Hominid Discovery
New Lens Helps Find Cancer Tumors
Are the Digits of Pi Random?
Doubly Strange Nuclei
People
About
Subscribe Free
This issue...
News in Brief
SciDAC
Earliest Hominid Discovery
New Lens Helps Find Cancer Tumors
Are the Digits of Pi Random?
Doubly Strange Nuclei
People
About
Subscribe Free
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News in Brief
2001 R&D 100 Awards Announced
Twenty-six of the 100 coveted R&D 100 Awardsthe "Oscars of invention"were bestowed on technologies resulting from U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored research.
The R&D 100 Awards competition, conducted annually by R&D Magazine, honors the most outstanding new technologies, processes, materials, and software with commercial potential. Awards are based on each achievement's technical significance, uniqueness, and the promise of real-world application.
Technical experts chosen by the magazine judge thousands of entries to select 100 winners of the annual contest. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)-supported laboratories, facilities, and small businesses won a full quarter of the total of this year's R&D 100 Awards.
The award-winning teams of researchers will be honored tonight at a banquet for the 2001 R&D 100 Awards scheduled tonight in Chicago at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
"I'm proud of the award-winning work done at DOE national laboratories and facilities," said Secretary Abraham. "These accomplishments clearly demonstrate the value of government-funded research to our nation."
The complete list of R&D 100 Awards is currently on the R&D Magazine website. The list of the 26 DOE-supported R&D 100 Award-winning technologies is available on the Office of Science website.
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Office of Science Wins APEX 2001 Award of Excellence!
The Department of Energy's Office of Science, a multidisciplinary science research agency, has been awarded the APEX 2001 Award of Excellence in the Web and Intranet Content category for the Office of Science website.
APEX 2001the 13th Annual Awards for Publication Excellenceis an international competition that recognizes outstanding publications from newsletters and magazines to annual reports, brochures and web sites.
According to the APEX 2001 judges, "The awards were based on excellence in graphic design, editorial content and the success of the entry in achieving overall communications effectiveness and excellence."
The APEX 2001 competition received 5,129 entries. A total of 75 APEX Grand Awards were presented in 11 major categories to honor the outstanding works in those categories. 1,336 APEX Awards of Excellence recognize excellence in 97 individual publishing categories.
The DOE's Office of Science supports a broad range of fundamental research through the national laboratory system and universities, and collaborates with industry to help commercialize promising technologies resulting from that research. It publishes two or three feature articles every week on the Office of Science website covering a broad range of topics in fusion, high energy and nuclear physics, climate research, the human genome, medical sciences, alternative energy research, geology, chemistry, materials sciences, and much more.
Contact: Rick Borchelt, U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, (202) 586-6702, rick.borchelt@science.doe.gov
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First Definitive Measurement of CP Violation in the B-Meson System
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) B-Factory's BaBar Detector collaboration, using data made available by the highly successful PEP-II collider, has announced the first definitive measurement of CP violation in the B-meson system. CP violation is an important factor in understanding how matter survived the cataclysmic conditions of the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe.
The detector records subtle distinctions between decays of B mesons and those of their antimatter counterparts, called anti-B mesons. Physicists used BaBar to observe an unmistakable difference, or asymmetry, between the rates at which B and anti-B mesons decay into a special set of specific final states. The collaboration calculated a parameter called sin 2ß (sine two beta), which expresses the degree of asymmetry between matter and antimatter. The collaboration reported a sin 2ß value of 0.59 plus or minus 0.14, which for the first time has sufficient precision to rule out a zero value. This measurement is consistent with predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics.
The BaBar collaboration is an international effort involving some 600 physicists from 73 institutions in nine countries. For background, see the B Factory and its physics program.
This research was supported by the Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics.
Technical Contact: Michael Riordan, SLAC,(650) 926-3990,
michael@SLAC.Stanford.EDU
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PCs into Supercomputers
The Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories has released to the public a computer software program that enables a collection of off-the-shelf desktop computers to rank among the world's fastest supercomputers.
The software program, called CplantTM system software, dramatically extends the capability of researchers to modularly assemble large blocks of off-the-shelf computer components.
The rationale behind this open-source release is to allow researchers free access to the body of research and development that created the most scalable, Linux-based, off-the-shelf computer available, says Sandia manager Neil Pundit. The hope, says Pundit, is that modifications and enhancements made by researchers elsewhere will enrich the system software, and that these improvements will be communicated back to Sandia.
While other cluster software may run faster, none exceed the Cplant system software's ability to help off-the-shelf processors work together in large numbers. Sandia's Cplant hardware comprises the largest known sets of Linux clusters for parallel computing. These sets are made up of Compaq Alpha processors and Myrinet interconnects. The largest cluster within Cplant comprises more than 1500 Alpha nodes.
Cplant system software is modeled after the system software that Sandia developed for the highly successful ASCI Red supercomputer built by Intel and installed at the Labs' Albuquerque site in 1997. For several years, ASCI Red was generally agreed to be the world's fastest computer.
The software can be downloaded from the Cplant website at http://www.cs.sandia.gov/cplant. This first open source release of the Cplant system software is named Release 1.0 and totals approximately 43 MB. Requesters must agree to software licensing terms before downloading.
Media Contact: Neal Singer, nsinger@sandia.gov
, (505) 845-7078.
Technical Contact: Neil Pundit, ndpundi@sandia.gov
, (505) 845-7601.
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World's Smallest Laser
A research team from the University of California/Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has grown the world's smallest lasera nanowire nanolaser one thousand times thinner than a human hair.
The laser, one of the first devices to arise from the field of nanotechnology, emits ultraviolet light, but can be tuned from blue to deep ultraviolet. The team grew the lasers using a standard technique called epitaxy, employed broadly today in the semiconductor industry, to grow extremely pure zinc oxide wires only 20 to 150 nanometers in diameter and 10,000 nanometers long (one nanometer is about the size of 10 hydrogen atoms laid side-by-side).
Although the present devices use another laser to excite the zinc oxide molecules, which then emit UV lighta process called optical pumpingthe ultimate goal is to "pump" the zinc oxide with electrons so the nanolasers can be integrated into electronic circuits. Once configured to work with electron pumping, the nanolaser could be put to any number of uses. For example, "lab-on-a-chip" devices could contain small laser analysis kitsnanodetectorswith capabilities such as Raman spectroscopy. Alternatively, a solid-state, short-wavelength, ultraviolet laser would allow an increase in the amount of data that can be stored on a high-density optical disk.
This research is supported by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences. For more information, see article in Science Beat.
Contact: Lynn Yarris, LBNL, lcyarris@lbl.gov
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World's Largest Unclassified Supercomputer
DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), has opened its newest supercomputera 3,328-processor IBM RS/6000 SP systemto more than 2,000 researchers at national laboratories and universities across the country.
The IBM SP, named "Seaborg" in honor of LBNL Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, is capable of performing five trillion calculations per second (5 teraflop/s). The supercomputer is located in LBNL's new Oakland Scientific Facility in Oakland, California. The new IBM SP boasts the computing power of more than one million desktop personal computers, all able to work together to tackle some of the world's toughest scientific problems. After thorough testing to ensure it met the rigorous demands of 24-by-7 operation, NERSC's IBM SP was opened to DOE's research community in late August. Soon afterward, scientists around the country began using its power to make important gains in studying complex problems.
For more information, see Berkeley Lab Research News, and NERSC, DOE's flagship center for unclassified computing, supported by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
Contact: Jon Bashor, (510) 486-5849, JBashor@lbl.gov
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