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DESY, Germany's leading particle physics and synchrotron radiation laboratory, and the DOE's SLAC, established a unique international collaboration for the development of X-ray free-electron lasers. Generating X-ray pulses ten billion times brighter and a thousandfold shorter in duration than existing sources, these ultra-brilliant beams will explore previously inaccessible realms in the chemical, biological and materials sciences as well as in nanoscale phenomenology, and atomic and plasma physics.

In an effort to stabilize climate and slow down global warming, Livermore scientists along with a team of international researchers have evaluated a series of new primary energy sources that either do not emit or limit the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere.

In the spring of 2001, two robotic Carbon Explorer floats recorded the rapid growth of phytoplankton in the upper layers of the North Pacific Ocean after a passing storm had deposited iron-rich dust from the Gobi Desert. The carbon measurements, reported in the October 25 issue of Science, are the first direct observation of wind-blown terrestrial dust fertilizing the growth of aquatic plant life.

Researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute and the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute will decode and study the genomes of two species of Phytophthora, a notorious plant pathogen responsible for sudden oak death syndrome and soybean root rot -- diseases that cause billions of dollars a year in forest and crop damage.

Berkeley Lab scientists have demonstrated that SATB1, a protein crucial to the development of the immune system, works by forming a network in the cell nucleus, attaching chromatin to the network structure at specific sites, and orchestrating remodeling of the chromatin over long distances to regulate gene expression.

Saul Perlmutter, a member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Physics Division and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project based here, has won the Department of Energy's 2002 E. O. Lawrence Award in the physics category. Perlmutter is Berkeley Lab's 25th recipient of the prestigious award, which includes a gold medal and cash prize of $25,000.

Two physicists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are winners of the E.O. Lawrence Award for their outstanding contributions in the field of atomic energy. Bruce Goodwin, a physicist and associate director in the Defense and Nuclear Technologies Directorate, was named for his work in the national security category, and Ben Santer, a physicist in the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, was honored for his work in the environmental science and technology category.

Keith O. Hodgson has been named a recipient of the DOE's Ernest O. Lawrence Award for 2002. Hodgson is a professor of chemistry at Stanford University and at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) and is director of SSRL. Hodgson's major areas of scientific impact are in research of chemistry and structural biology, for which he uses the remarkable properties of synchrotron radiation for x-ray absorption, diffraction and scattering.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have produced the first ever action movies starring individual water molecules on a metal surface. The ending was a surprise even to the producers.

Scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have just completed a 1,000-year run of a powerful new climate system model on a supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.