Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole’s newly published biography of the “uncle of the atom bomb,” as Frank Oppenheimer called himself, recounts the touching and sometimes tortuous relationship between Frank, Ernest Lawrence, and other physicists as they struggled to find a way to survive a nuclear age. Oppenheimer’s solution was to found an extraordinary science museum, the Exploratorium.

Berkeley Lab’s Oct. 26 Science at the Theater event, “Dark Secrets: What Science Tells Us About the Hidden Universe,” was a smash hit: more than 600 people packed the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Host John Fowler, health and science editor for KTVU Channel 2, moderated a panel of astrophysicists and cosmologists that included Saul Perlmutter, David Schlegel, and Alexie Leauthaud.

Scientists have pieced together a mechanism that causes a type of human adult stem cell to permanently stop dividing after being exposed to ionizing radiation. Their work sheds light on cellular senescence, a process in which cells stop dividing that is linked to cancer and aging.

Three-quarters of the Universe is dark energy, but nobody knows what it is. Is it an unknown form of energy that fills space, or an illusion caused by extra dimensions of space? Or is it just a flaw in Einstein’s theory of gravity? Proven techniques for investigating these questions are being refined, while new techniques are beginning to be applied to one of the most pressing problems in 21st-century physics. Part 1 discusses supernovae as standard candles.

Baryon acoustic oscillations provides a “standard ruler” for the Universe, a way to measure the details of dark energy.

Gravitational lensing, which depends on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, directly tests its ability to predict the growth of large-scale structure.

A report from the National Academies of Science cites damage to human health from air pollution associated with electricity generation and motor vehicle transportation as one of the single biggest hidden costs of energy production

A symposium in Washington organized by the Office of High Energy Physics will break new ground in integrating research and development of many kinds of accelerators in many fields.

Warm dense matter exists in the cores of gas giant planets and the preliminary stages of nuclear fusion, among other inaccessible places. With an accelerator built at Berkeley Lab by physicists and engineers in the Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory, a collaboration of Berkeley Lab, Livermore, and Princeton, scientists will soon be able to study it in the laboratory.

Hyper-SAGE boosts remote MRI signals 10,000 times, making it possible to image molecular-sized clinical targets, including lung and other cancers.