Scientists at DOE’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory have developed a technology to help people breathe a little easier. The Indoor Air Quality Monitoring and Control system has the potential to save money and energy and keep indoor air safe to breathe. The system is composed of a set of off-the-shelf sensors and incorporates a series of computer programs which detect airborne chemicals and compares them to a stored library of readings. It can be customized to fit the needs of a particular building with applications ranging from alleviating “sick building syndrome” to detecting decaying produce in potato cellars. 
 

Perhaps all that separates modern humans from Neandertals is a single genetic alteration and a daily dose of iodine, a paper by Jerome Dobson, of DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, concludes. An improvement in the thyroid’s ability to extract and use iodine may explain most differences in body shape and bone structure. In humans, the lack of iodine is known to cause cretinism, the most severe form of iodine deficiency disorder. Modern societies add iodine to table salt, and coastal residents get plenty of iodine from saltwater fish, shellfish and seaweed. Dobson theorizes that Neandertals living in inland Ice Age Europe might have lacked an adequate supply of iodine. 
 

A promising technology developed by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory to increase the efficiency and production capacity of geothermal power plants was demonstrated at the Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal power plant in northern California. After the advanced direct-contact condenser technology was installed at one of the plant’s operating units, its power production efficiency increased by 5 percent and potential power capacity increased by 17 percent. NREL recently entered into an agreement to license the technology with Ecolaire of Easton, Pa. Ecolaire supplies 70 percent of U.S.-manufactured geothermal condensers to worldwide markets. 
 

A groundbreaking ceremony at Zion National Park in Utah signaled the start of a new era in energy efficiency for the National Park Service. The park’s new visitor transportation center, a low-energy passive solar building that will use 70 percent less energy and save taxpayers almost $2 million, is scheduled to open in 2000. DOE’s Exemplary Buildings Program and building engineers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory helped design the structure, which will showcase cost effective, climate sensitive building technology. The new facility will feature natural daylighting and ventilation, evaporative cooling and a thermal storage wall for radiant heat in colder months. 
 

Some of the more shadowy secrets of biology may soon be illuminated through the use of a new type of fluorescent probe developed by scientists at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A joint Berkeley Lab-UC Berkeley research team, headed by materials scientists Paul Alivisatos and Shimon Weiss, has developed nanometer-sized crystals of semiconductors that can be used as fluorescent probes for the study of biological materials. These semiconductor nanocrystals offer a distinct advantage over conventional dye-molecules in that they emit multiple colors of light, which means they can be used to label and measure several biological markers simultaneously over a period of time. 
 

DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is developing a software program that will separate information from lengthy documents into summaries. The technology, called Topic Islands , will recognize themes and the evolution of topics within a document and segregate information into easily understandable portions. Topic Islands categorizes documents into themes using algorithms and can process many pages simultaneously. The technology will be applicable to businesses wanting to better manage document storage, legal aides searching for case law, and intelligence agencies needing better information analysis. Development is funded by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 
 

In a White House ceremony, Vice President Gore announced delivery to DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of ASCI Blue Pacific, a supercomputer capable of nearly four-trillion operations per second. IBM delivered the massive machine, with more than 2.6 trillion bytes of memory, six months early. Inside, thousands of coupled processors run large calculations in parallel by dividing them into smaller problems, solving them simultaneously, then reassembling them into an integrated solution. During a record-shattering September demonstration, the equipment ran a complex turbulence-simulation code at a sustained rate exceeding a trillion calculations per second, while processing more than 70 billion zones simultaneously.