Silicon good to 2024, graphene to succeed

The ISSCC (International Solid State Circuit Conference) has started in San Francisco with keynote speaker James Meindl, professor of microelectronics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, making precise predictions about the future of silicon electronics and what will most likely follow in the post-silicon world. Researchers at the American Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have also found a way to induce a tunable bandgap in graphene, a necessary electronic state that allows the efficient switching necessary for workable transistors. More>

CERN scientists ramp up to restart collider

When the LHC operates at full tilt, its collisions will reach energies of 14 TeV. Initially, planners anticipated achieving that in early 2011, after a six-month maintenance shutdown scheduled for next winter. But at a meeting last week, CERN officials opted to run at the 7 TeV energy for the next 18 to 24 months. The facility would enter a planned shutdown in the fall of 2011 to prepare for running at the design energy, then aim for 14 TeV once that shutdown ends. Getting there will be a gradual process. Step 1 is to bring the machine up to a collision energy of 7 TeV while increasing the number of protons racing around the underground ring. Although 7 TeV is half the LHC's maximum, it should generate interesting science, says Marjorie Shapiro, a physicist at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. More>

90% of Himalayan Glacier Melting Caused by Aerosols & Black Carbon

We've reported a number of times on the growing body of knowledge pointing to aerosols being a greater component of climate change than previously thought, and to black carbon soot accelerating Himalayan glacier melting. Well, some new research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory quantifies that effect a bit more. The article goes on to caution that black carbon may be an even larger contributor than that though--perhaps as much as four times higher Menon says--because data inventories used in the simulations report less black carbon than what has been measured at several monitoring stations in India.Unfortunately though, this measured data is not complete enough to be incorporated into these particular climate models. More>

Neuroimaging Study may Pave way for Effective Alzheimer's Treatments

Scientists have determined that a new instrument known as PIB-PET is effective in detecting deposits of amyloid-beta protein plaques in the brains of living people, and that these deposits are predictive of who will develop Alzheimer’s disease. The study also showed that older individuals with amyloid deposits were much more likely to show cognitive decline over time than their “amyloid-negative” counterparts, says Rabinovici, whose co-author was William Jagust, MD, of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. More>

Thirdhand smoke forms indoor carcinogens

A common indoor air chemical reacts with residues of tobacco smoke clinging to clothing, skin and surfaces to form potent carcinogens, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory reported in a study published Monday. A few years ago, researchers began paying closer attention to the potential health effects of "thirdhand smoke," which is a thin layer of toxic substances from tobacco smoke that settles on surfaces long after cigarettes have been extinguished. The scientists, however, are the first to find that nitrous acid, an indoor air pollutant created by gas appliances, vehicle engines and tobacco smoke, reacts with nicotine found on surfaces. More>

Stories on this topic also appeared in the Telegraph, Nature, Marie Claire, Discover, NPR, BBC, Business Week, Scientific American, ABC 7 News (KGO), CBS5 (KPIX), and the Contra Costa Times, among numerous other outlets.

What's really causing Himalayan glaciers to melt?

Although there's still disagreement on how much Himalayan glaciers, sometimes called "the third polar region," are melting, glaciologists tend to agree that they are melting, and that this poses a significant problem in the long run. More than a billion people in Asia rely on glacial meltwater for a steady, year-round supply of fresh water. If the glaciers disappear, the region's water supply might be threatened. Now, a new study by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and NCAR, finds that human-emitted aerosols are the single major contributor to glacial melt in the Himalayas. More>

A story on this topic also appeared in Green Energy News.

MADmap mapping the universe

Universe mapping is a crucial study and mapping the cosmic microwave backgrround (CMB) depend on measuring minute differences in the temperature of the sky. Berkeley Lab scientists thus developed a code called Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package, or MADCAP for CMB experiments. According to a news report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, mapping the CMB requires accurately accounting for noise in the data. More>