DOE's Berkeley Lab researchers have established the first M-Bone internet connection to the South Pole. Starting on March 29, researchers in Berkeley's Physics and Nuclear Sciences Divisions have been going on-line to chat with scientists at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. M-Bone, which stands for Multicast Backbone, is a means of transmitting sound and pictures via computers using an efficient method of allocating internet resources.  Developed at Berkeley Lab, the M-Bone is now mainly used at DOE's national labs.  As more internet bandwith becomes available, the hope is to extend M-Bone to secondary schools as well.  
 

Energy Secretary Federico Peña announced an $80 million contract with IBM to supply DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the world's fastest supercomputer, capable of 10 trillion floating operations per second, in the year 2000. Supercomputer computations that would take years today, will be completed in days. "Option White" represents level three in the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative that will simulate aging nuclear weapon operations. ASCI is essential to DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program. It supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by maintaining our nuclear deterrent without underground testing. ASCI computers also will improve the ability to forecast global climate changes, design aircraft and automobiles, and introduce new drug therapies. For details see http://www.llnl.gov/asci/news/white-news.html. 
 

Modern technology has created the opportunity to access thousands of pieces of data but the abundance of information can be overwhelming to the information analyst.  Starlight and SPIRE, two advanced computer visualization technologies, have been developed by DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to help solve the problem of information overload. The programs graphically display images based on verbal similarities and themes in text.  Starlight and SPIRE can be applied to a variety of fields including medical data analysis, criminal investigations, environmental and national security, and current events monitoring.  
 

The success of a project involving DOE's Ames Laboratory could mean a new generation of rechargeable batteries that are powerful, inexpensive and environmentally safe. The project involves the development of a new class of magnesium-based materials that can absorb and release hydrogen.  Magnesium is lighter and holds more hydrogen than the materials now used in rechargeable batteries for cars, cellular phones, electronics and power tools. Ames Lab researchers will concentrate on finding the most effective, cost-efficient method of processing the new alloys into metal powders. They plan to use high-pressure gas atomization to produce the ultrafine powder particles needed in batteries. 
 

Fusion researchers at DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey are testing the use of radio frequency and microwave heating for the pasteurization of raw liquid foods such as eggs, fruit juices, and milk, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These heating techniques are used in fusion devices to heat hot ionized gas, or plasma, to the temperatures required for fusion energy production. Radio frequency waves offer advantages over the traditional pasteurization method of directly heating raw liquid foods. The direct method often heats foods unevenly, possibly resulting in incomplete pasteurization in lower temperature regions and in denaturing foods in overheated regions. Using radio frequency waves of the appropriate wavelength may allow pasteurization without heating liquid foods to temperatures that cause food deterioration. 
 

Computing--New "Super" Life for Old Computers   

To create a composite map of U.S. soil characteristics, environmental researchers at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory needed a powerful supercomputer to analyze billions of bits of data from more than 8 million square kilometers of landscape. Problem was, the supercomputers on hand are usually booked solid. So the researchers did what every resourceful scientist learns to do--they built their own. They salvaged dozens of cast-off 486 computers, connected them in parallel and are solving problems they couldn't solve using serial workstations. The researchers expect their "poor man's supercomputer" to be useful for other applications, especially in testing new programs before running them on state-of-the-art supercomputers. For more information on the "poor man's supercomputer," see http://www.esd.ornl.gov/facilities/beowulf/. 
 

New Technology Demonstrates Priority Service  
for Internet   

DOE's Berkeley and Argonne national labs have successfully demonstrated a new technology for giving priority status to data as it is routed across the Internet. The technology, developed by Berkeley Lab's Network Research Group, specially marks data packets, which are then recognized by network routers and given priority as they pass through congested networks. In tests, priority-marked video data transmitted at eight frames per second, while unmarked packets moved at one frame per second. Called "Differentiated Services," the technology will allow Internet users to select levels of service, much like reserving a first-class, business-class or coach seat on an airline. 
 

For They Are Jolly Good Fellows

The Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship Program continues to infuse DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory with talented young researchers. Physicist Xindong Wang and geologist Jonathan Adams just completed their two-year fellowships, and two more postdocs will join the Laboratory this summer. Of 47 fellowship recipients, 29 have stayed on as researchers at ORNL where they have garnered four DOE Materials Sciences Awards, a Biemann Medal, three Lockheed Martin Nova awards, and two R&D 100 awards for the Lab. The fellowship's namesake, who died in 1995, was a Nobel laureate and first research director at ORNL.