Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Science at the Theater

HOT TECHNOLOGY, COOL SCIENCE

Great innovations start with bold ideas. Learn how Berkeley Lab scientists are devising practical solutions to everything from global warming to how you get to work.

Join a roundtable conversation moderated by KTVU Channel 2's Jon Fowler. Five Berkeley Lab Scientists will discuss how technologies they have developed are improving the world.

Preserving History, One Recording at a Time

Many fragile and broken sound recordings are at risk of receding into history, never to be heard again: Jack London’s voice, Native American languages, blues songs. Physicist Carl Haber led a team that invented a way to digitally reconstruct old recordings using methods developed for high-energy physics experiments. The technology, in use at the U.S. Library of Congress, optically maps the grooves in shellac records, wax cylinders, and other outdated media. Archivists estimate that many of the millions of recordings in the world’s sound archives could benefit from the technology.

Coming Soon: Battery-Powered Commute

The commute of the future might not include a stop at the gas station, thanks to chemical engineer Nitash Balsara. He invented a breakthrough polymer that could lead to safe and long-lasting rechargeable batteries. Solid-state batteries containing Balsara’s polymer electrolyte are expected to meet the energy density goal established by the Department of Energy for electric vehicles — the highest hurdle for battery technology. Batteries made with the new material are also inherently safe because they lack liquids and flammable components.

Cool Your Roof, Cool the World

What can you do fight global warming? Paint your roof white, then spread the word. Energy efficiency expert Hashem Akbari has helped to pioneer the development of cool roofing materials, which reflect sunlight, lower surface temperature, and slash cooling costs. Think globally: if all the world’s roofs and pavement used cool materials, the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions would be equivalent to taking the world’s 600 million cars off the road for 18 years. Akbari is also a world-renowned expert on urban heat islands and their impact on energy use.

PhyloChip: A DNA Probe that Sniffs out All Manner of Microbes

Want to know what bacteria or other pathogens may be lurking in the air or water? Over the past 11 years, Todd DeSantis has steered the computational design and analysis efforts for the PhyloChip, an inexpensive, DNA-based test to detect and quantify all known types of microorganisms. The PhyloChip has drastically increased the ability of medical and environmental scientists to monitor infections, manage natural resources and discover microbes helpful in biofuel production. It has been used everywhere from beaches in Marin to hospitals to test for anthrax. DeSantis is a software developer in the Molecular Microbial Ecology Group in Berkeley Lab’s Earth Sciences Division.

Green Computing:  Supercomputers for the 21st Century

Industry these days is searching not only to make computers faster and more powerful, it desperately hopes to make them less voracious consumers of energy. Earlier this year, Berkeley Lab announced the Green Flash, a prototype of what could be a new class of energy-efficient supercomputers. A breakthrough in both software and computer architecture allowed Green Flash to perform climate modeling computations that had previously been impossible. Katherine Yelick is the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. NERSC is one of the world’s largest facilities devoted to providing computational resources and expertise for basic scientific research.

THIS EVENT IS FREE!