InBerkeley

You’ve heard of desktop PCs, which stole the thunder from massive mainframe computers 30 years ago.  Now, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are racing to build desktop particle accelerators to rival the big ones at CERN, Stanford and elsewhere, as detailed in this Popular Science article:

The BELLA accelerator uses synchronized lasers to speed up electrons over very short distances. But whereas the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLA) is 2 miles long, BELLA fits in a single room.

Of course, large accelerators like the SLA or CERN’s famous LHC are far more powerful than BELLA, and thus able to investigate much smaller particles. However, BELLA scientists believe that they can daisy-chain together a number of lasers to create an accelerator as powerful as the big boys, in a fraction of the space.

General

The fire danger level for the Berkeley-Oakland hills has been upgraded (or should that be downgraded?) from Low to Moderate.

Emergencies, Environment Emergencies, Environment, Fire danger

Julie D provides an excellent guide to thrift stores on University Avenue on TownMe:

So you think you found some sweet deals at Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads? Well, I don’t want to say you’re wrong or anything, or that these buy-sell-trade stores might not be worth the pretty penny you’ve been spending. I’ll just say that I much prefer the unexpected capture of a hidden treasure from a thrift store.

Luckily enough, a majority of the thrift stores in Berkeley are located around the same place. An epic day of thrift shopping begins and ends simply on University Avenue. The most important thing to remember is that this outing quickly morphs into a hunt, so a thrift-shopper must be ready to stalk in tall blades of grass for a good amount of time otherwise the venture will be fruitless.

General, Retail

If you were near the campus today and wondered about the sirens, it was the university’s annual emergency preparedness exercise. It makes sense when you straddle the Hayward fault.

General