An explosion occurred at approximately 9:30 p.m. Monday, October 13, 2008, at a drinking water pump station on the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory property. No one was injured; the building, located in a remote area of the site, sustained substantial damage.

An explosion occurred at approximately 9:30 p.m. Monday, October 13, 2008, at a drinking water pump station on the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory property. No one was injured in the event; the building sustained substantial damage.

U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Dr. Raymond L. Orbach has congratulated Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for co-winning the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for transforming a green fluorescent protein from jellyfish into one of the most important tools of molecular biology that researchers now use to watch such previously invisible processes as the development of nerve cells in the brain or how cancer cells are formed.

Satoshi Ozaki, a physicist at Brookhaven Lab, has been selected as the recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2009 Robert R. Wilson Prize. Named to honor the first director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the $5,000 prize recognizes and encourages outstanding achievement in the physics of particle accelerators.

Using positron emission tomography (PET) to track tracer doses of methamphetamine in humans’ brains, scientists at Brookhaven Lab find that the addictive and long-lasting effects of this increasingly prevalent drug can be explained in part by its pharmacokinetics — the rate at which it enters and clears the brain, and its distribution.

One major goal on the path toward making useful superconducting devices has been engineering materials that act as superconductors at the nanoscale. Such nanoscale superconductors would be useful in devices such as superconductive transistors and eventually in ultrafast, power-saving electronics. In the October 9, 2008, issue of Nature, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory report that they have successfully produced two-layer thin films where neither layer is superconducting on its own,

Alan Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give a BSA Distinguished Lecture titled "Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse?" at Brookhaven Lab on Thursday, November 6, at 7 p.m. in Berkner Hall.

Brookhaven Science Associates, which manages Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy, awarded five Suffolk County nonprofit organizations with BreakThru Mini-Grants at a ceremony held at Brookhaven Lab on October 1.

Fritz Henn, Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences at Brookhaven Lab, has been named a recipient of the Federal Cross of Merit, a high-level honor of the Federal Republic of Germany.

During October and November 2008, some 150 scientists from 40 institutions in eight nations — including scientists from Brookhaven Lab — will take part in an international field experiment designed to make observations of critical components of the climate system of the southeastern Pacific.

The world’s largest computing grid is ready to tackle mankind’s biggest data challenge from the earth’s most powerful accelerator.

Come play “Tennis for Two,” one of the world’s first video games, designed to entertain visitors at Brookhaven Lab 50 years ago.

Brookhaven Lab has issued its 2007 Site Environmental Report. Highlights include significant progress on the environmental cleanup of the site, recognition of pollution prevention initiatives, and reduced environmental effluents and emissions.

Flexible filamentous viruses make up a large fraction of known plant viruses and are responsible for more than half the viral damage to crop plants throughout the world. New details of their structures have been revealed by Brookhaven scientists and their collaborators using sophisticated imaging techniques. These findings may lead to new ways to protect crop plants from viruses and other forms of damage.

Samuel Krinsky, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has won thee 2008 Free Electron Laser (FEL) Prize. Sponsored by the FEL Conference, which was held this year in Gyeungju, Korea, the prize consists of an award citation, a plaque, and approximately $3,000.

The Facilities & Operations (F&O) Directorate at Brookhaven Lab has been reorganized to improve services to its customers and to better focus on supporting the strategic direction of the Laboratory.

Masaki Suenaga, a retired metallurgist who remains an active researcher at Brookhaven Lab, has received the IEEE Council on Superconductivity Award for significant and sustained contributions to applied superconductivity.

An international collaboration of scientists today sent the first beam of protons zooming at nearly the speed of light around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

Contemporary folksinger, guitarist and songwriter James O’Malley will give a concert at Brookhaven Lab on Friday, October 3, at 7 p.m. at the Brookhaven Center. Sponsored by the BNL Music Club, the concert is open to the public.

If your experiment doesn’t go the way you expect, take a closer look — something even more interesting may have happened. That strategy has led scientists at Brookhaven to discover a fundamental shift in an enzyme’s function that could help expand the toolbox for engineering biofuels and other plant-based oil products.