Clyde Taylor, pioneering scientist and engineer of superconducting magnet technology at Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, died November 16, 2011.

From the planet’s core to its surface, heat enables Earth’s magnetic field, spreads the sea floor, and keeps continents on the move. Much of the heat is “radiogenic,” from the radioactive decay of elements in the crust and mantle, but how much? By measuring neutrinos from deep in the Earth, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues at Japan’s KamLAND neutrino detector have published the most precise estimate yet of radiogenic heat.

When the universe was only millionths of a second old, quarks moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons, but soon protons and neutrons and other forms of ordinary matter “froze out” of this quark-matter soup. Now scientists have compared quantum theory and data from the STAR experiment for the first time to map out the energies and temperatures where ordinary matter melts and the quark-gluon plasma freezes.

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.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for chemical analysis and, in the form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an indispensable technique for medical diagnosis. But its uses have been limited by the need for strong magnetic fields and big, expensive, superconducting magnets. Now Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have demonstrated that they can do NMR in a zero magnetic field without using any magnets at all.

Antimatter nuclei of helium-4, the heaviest antiparticles ever found, have been created by the STAR experiment at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Eighteen examples of the antihelium particles were detected by STAR’s Time Projection Chamber, designed and built at Berkeley Lab, in debris from a billion high-energy collisions of gold nuclei.

How much do different kinds of neutrinos weigh? And which kind is the heaviest? The answers could explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, and indeed why there is any matter at all. Clues lie in determining the “mixing angles” at which neutrinos oscillate, one type into another. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment, an international collaboration whose U.S. participants are led by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers, seeks to determine the most elusive mixing angle of them all, called theta one-three. See this interactive photographic tour of the remarkable underground laboratory.

Albert Ghiorso, who died December 26, 2010, at the age of 95, was not only one of the world’s most extraordinary nuclear scientists, his career helped shaped Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory during the middle decades of the 20th century. Many of those who knew him best describe his unique character and recall some of the high points and setbacks of his life and work.

Albert Ghiorso, lifelong nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the co-discoverer of twelve chemical elements, more than anyone else in history, died December 26, 2010, at the age of 95.

IceCube, the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector, is now complete. The giant neutrino telescope, buried a mile and a half deep in the Antarctic ice, now has its complete array of 86 strings carrying over 5,000 photodetectors, deployed to search for signs of neutrinos passing through the clear polar ice. The electronics and packaging of the photodetectors, called Digital Optical Modules, were conceived, designed, and tested by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers.