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.

After a quarter of a century in the Northwest, including 15 years as head of DOE’s Institute for Nuclear Theory, native Californian Wick Haxton returns to the Bay Area, with joint appointments in the Nuclear Science Division and UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics.

For decades nuclear scientists have searched for an Island of Stability among notoriously short-lived artificial heavy elements. Now researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division and UC Berkeley have made a step forward in the quest by confirming the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it.

The weak interaction has the shortest range of the fundamental forces and does some of the most peculiar things, like changing the flavor of quarks, governing the interactions of neutrinos, and violating parity—nature’s mirror symmetry. In ytterbium, researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division have measured the largest parity violations ever observed in an atom.

Generations of Berkeley Lab nuclear scientists have contributed to FRIB, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a $550 million heavy-ion accelerator to study rare nuclear processes that will be built at Michigan State University. Crucial components of FRIB are its ion source, based on the 88-Inch Cyclotron’s record-breaking VENUS, and GRETA, the gamma-ray detector designed and now under construction here. Nuclear Science Division Director James Symons participates in the launch of the new accelerator.