On May 3, 2011, the 100th birthday of renowned physicist Luis Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for his work in particle physics at the Bevatron and known worldwide for his codiscovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, was celebrated by the American Physical Society’s Forum on the History of Physics with invited reminiscences from three physicists who worked with him closely during his career at Berkeley Lab: Richard Muller, Moishe Pripstein, and Arthur Rosenfeld.

Plants rely on a tight-knit army of soil microbes to defend themselves against pathogens, much the way mammals harbor a raft of microbes to avoid infections. The discovery, led by a Berkeley Lab team that used the PhyloChip, could help scientists develop ways to better protect the world’s food crops from devastating diseases. The scientists deciphered, for the first time, the group of microbes that enables a patch of soil to suppress a plant-killing pathogen.

Berkeley Lab scientists have developed one of the most detailed pictures yet of how climate change could impact millions of tons of methane frozen in sediment beneath the Arctic Ocean. They found that methane could seep into the Arctic Ocean and gradually overwhelm the marine environment’s ability to break down the gas. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

About a third of the airborne lead particles recently collected at two sites in the San Francisco Bay Area came from Asia, a finding that underscores the far-flung impacts of air pollution and heralds a new way to study its journey across vast distances. Scientists from Berkeley Lab and the California Air Resources Board used the lead particles’ isotopic signature as a chemical return address and traced some of it to coal and metal ore found in Asia.

A few weeks ago, Gina Lamendella was standing on the deck of the 165-foot Brooks McCall research vessel at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when she learned that she received an Ernest Orlando Lawrence Fellowship. Her shipboard celebration was short-lived, however. She was soon back to work, helping to collect the smallest of organisms in an effort to track one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Preston Jordan is Berkeley Lab’s resident expert on the site’s geology—and a highly sought-after one, given the nagging concerns in the area over earthquakes and landslides. “Slope stability is a concern at the Lab, though it’s a concern just as it is anywhere in the Berkeley Hills,” he says. “It’s not a unique concern.”

Part Two of a five-part series outlining the proposals awarded “Discovery” Laboratory Research and Development funds for 2010. This part describes an advanced approach to modeling subsurface fluids.

The fact that glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are thinning is not disputed. However, few researchers have attempted to rigorously examine and quantify the causes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Surabi Menon and her collaborators found that airborne black carbon aerosols, or soot, from India is a major contributor to the decline in snow and ice cover on the glaciers.

A first-of-its-kind computer simulation that mirrors real-world observations of methane bubbling up from a seabed in the Arctic Ocean provides further evidence that warming oceans may unleash vast quantities of methane trapped in hydrate deposits buried beneath the seafloor.