Study reveals dangers of third-hand smoke

Nicotine in third-hand smoke, the residue from tobacco smoke that clings to virtually all surfaces long after a cigarette has been extinguished, reacts with the common indoor air pollutant nitrous acid to produce dangerous carcinogens. This new potential health hazard was revealed in a multi-institutional study led by researchers with Berkeley Lab. More>

Wadia Appointed to White House Science Policy Office

Lab scientist Cyrus Wadia has accepted an invitation from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to go to Washington, DC and advise the Obama Administration on renewable energy issues. Wadia will take a one-year leave of absence from his duties at the Lab and at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. His main charter at OSTP is to support the President’s mission to make solar energy economically viable at a global scale.

Lab's image graces Physics Today cover

Berkeley Lab's Miquel Salmeron, an expert in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM), provided the cover art for this month’s edition of Physics Today – an STM image of water on the surface of the precious metal palladium. The image shows hexagonal rings of water molecules self-assembled into narrow chains and clusters, as depicted in the superimposed illustration. To see the cover go here>

Madly Mapping the Universe

It takes special software to map the universe from noisy data. A Berkeley Lab code called MADmap does just that for the cosmic microwave background; now it has been adapted by scientists to make spectacular images of the infrared universe. More>

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