Berkeley Lab chemist Christopher Chang and his research group at UC Berkeley have developed a series of fluorescent probes for molecular imaging of copper in the brain. Metal copper has chemical properties that make it essential to a healthy brain. “As a consequence of its high demand for oxygen and oxidative metabolism, the brain has among the highest levels of copper, as well as iron and zinc in the body,” says Chang. More>
Posts Tagged ‘Chemical Sciences Division’
Fluorescent Probes Developed to Image Copper in the Brain
Tuesday, May 28th, 2013Chemical Scientist Hendrik Bluhm Receives Bessel Research Award
Friday, May 24th, 2013
Hendrik Bluhm of the Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division is the recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research award, bestowed by Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Award winners are honored for their outstanding research record and invited to spend a period of up to one year cooperating on a long-term research project with specialist colleagues at a research institution in Germany. Bluhm works on beamline 11.0.2 at the Advanced Light Source, investigating solid/vapor and liquid/vapor interfaces under realistic conditions of pressure and temperature, using photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy.
PNNL’s Jim Fredrickson to Speak on Technetium for Durbin Memorial Lecture
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013
The fourth Annual Patricia Durbin Memorial Lecture will be held on Wednesday, May 29, at 4 p.m. in the Building 66 Auditorium. The lecture honors the late Patricia Durbin, best known for her seminal work in medical aspects of radiation protection. The Glenn T. Seaborg Center of the Chemical Sciences Division will host refreshments at 3:30 p.m., followed by the Memorial Lecture on “Environmental Biogeochemistry of 99Technetium: Implications for Subsurface Transport at the Hanford Site” presented by James Fredrickson of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
All Hands Toward Safety: CSD’s Belkacem Provides His Perspective
Monday, March 18th, 2013
Ali Belkacem sees a safe working environment as a productive one. The Chemical Sciences Division interim director shares how empowering and educating individuals leads them to performing work safely, and as a direct relation, efficiently. “Creating the safest, most productive work environment isn’t going to happen if you don’t have buy-in from every employee involved,” he says. Visit the Safety Culture website to read Ali’s “Perspectives” column.
Frances Houle Named Director of JCAP-North
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
Frances Houle of the Chemical Sciences Division (CSD) has been named to head JCAP-North – the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, which was created in 2011 along with its sister facility, JCAP-South at Caltech, to develop a solar-fuel technology. Houle, who has been directing CSD’s strategic initiatives, has more than 30 years of research experience. She holds a PhD in chemistry from Caltech and spent much of her career studying thin films and solid surfaces at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. She succeeds Heinz Frei of the Materials Sciences Division who’s served as JCAP-North’s acting head this past year.
In the Blink of an Eye: X-ray Imaging on the Attosecond Timescale
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
In the blink of an eye, more attoseconds have expired than the age of Earth measured in … minutes. A lot more. To be precise, an attosecond is one billionth of a billionth of a second. The attosecond timescale is where you must go to study the electron action that is the starting point of all of chemistry. Heralded as the science of the 21st century by Science and The Economist, attosecond science is a new frontier of molecular and material science. Berkeley Lab chemist Ali Belkacem has been using powerful laboratory-scale lasers to test whether multidimensional nonlinear x-ray spectroscopy on the attosecond timescale is practical for the light sources of the future. He recently presented his work at the annual AAAS meeting held this year in Boston. More>
Chemical Scientist Hartwig Wins ACS Catalysis Lectureship
Wednesday, March 6th, 2013
ACS Catalysis and the ACS Division of Catalysis Science & Technology announce that Berkeley Lab chemical scientist and UC Berkeley professor John Hartwig has won the 2013 ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science, in recognition of his many and varied recent achievements. The lectureship will take place at the 2013 ACS fall meeting in Indianapolis. Hartwig has made important synthetic and mechanistic advances in a wide range of organic and catalytic reactions, including asymmetric allylic substitution, intermolecular hydroaminations of unactivated alkenes, and enantioselective as well as high-throughput methods for catalyst and reaction discovery. More>
Decoding the Chemical Recipe of the Solar System
Thursday, February 21st, 2013
The ratio of isotopes in elements like oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen were once thought to be much the same everywhere, determined only by their different masses. Then isotope ratios in meteorites, interplanetary dust and gas, and the sun itself were found to differ from those on Earth. Planetary researchers like UC San Diego’s Mark Thiemens and his colleagues, working with Musa Ahmed of the Chemical Sciences Division, are now using the Chemical Dynamics Beamline at the Advanced Light Source to study these “mass-independent” effects and their origins in the chemical processes of the early solar system. More>
A Clock Einstein Would Have Loved
Friday, January 11th, 2013
Holger Müller, guest scientist with the Chemical Sciences Division, led a team of Berkeley scientists in the development of a “Compton frequency clock,” a special clock that can measure time on the basis of the mass of a single atomic or even subatomic particle. The clock, which uses an atom interferometer developed by Energy Secretary Steve Chu while at Stanford, holds promise not only for ultraprecise measurements of mass and time, but also for such exotic applications as testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity, or the effects of gravity on antimatter. More>
Lab Well Represented at 2012 AGU Meeting
Monday, December 3rd, 2012
About 20,000 people are expected to attend the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this week. Among them will be several dozen scientists from the Environmental Energy Technologies, Chemical Sciences, Computational Research, and Earth Sciences Divisions, who will present talks and posters on topics ranging from climate science, soil geochemistry, computer modeling, geothermal energy, and more. In addition to presenters, the Earth Sciences Division will host a booth featuring “meet-the-scientist” sessions. From Tuesday through Thursday, more than 20 ESD scientists will be on hand to discuss their research with attendees.
