The Secretary of Energy posted it to his Facebook earlier today, so, y’know. We couldn’t not watch it. (Oh, and for the record his celebrity doppelganger is Steven Chu! God, he is so clever and ironic.)

Secretary Chu Speaks at the 2010 Washginton Auto Show [YouTube]
Earlier: Chusing Panelists to Decide America’s Nuclear Fuchure

The “let’s turn science-y stuff into a form of entertainment that people will actually want to watch in their free time” approach has been successful in the past with shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy, the Magic School Bus and Carl Sagan’s series “The Cosmos.”

So it’s no surprise that the latest video from the campus musical group the Sounds of Science has become an instant YouTube hit. Since their last video, “The Nano Song,” they’ve really stepped it up on special effects, lyrics and editing. Lawrence Lab even blows up in the video.

Only one problem: “The Safety Song” isn’t actually that safe: a radioactive fluid is cleaned up with a paper towel (no puppet evacuation, tisk tisk) and safety glasses are worn instead of safety goggles. So LBL’s asking for a few revisions before they use it as part of their safety demo.

The Safety Song [YouTube]
Students Turn Sounds of Science Into YouTube Hit [Daily Cal]

It seems like the Lawrence Berkeley Lab is always getting in the news for something or other. Now, it’s for getting a pretty sweet cut out of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act pot—$7 million, to be vaguely precise. And this time the funding is for geothermal energy research.

“Now wait a minute, Clog,” you suspiciously ask.

“Isn’t geothermal energy what kept the human race alive in a machine-run world in the Matrix series? Is this just the beginning to the inevitable end of humanity as we know it?”

Well, no, actually virtual reality worlds and Keanu Reeves have little to do with it.

Basically, there are geothermal technologies out there already. And they kind of suck. The LBL has four programs looking into methods that can get energy where the current technologies are woefully impotent.

The four programs are known as: Fluid Imaging, Estimating Fracture Surface Area, CO2 As Fluid and THMC Modeling. Respectively, they are probably way more complicated than a layman’s explanation.

Fun facts about geothermal energy, taken from the LBL site:
*Total electricity used by the U.S. that is generated by geothermal energy is less than 1 percent.
*Eight percent of renewable energy is made geothermally.
*Enhanced geothermal technologies could go up 40 times, up to about 10 percent of total U.S. energy consumption.

Image Source: VancityAllie under Creative Commons
Berkeley Lab Receives $7 Million for Enhanced Geothermal Energy Technologies [LBL]

Last Thursday, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab announced it confirmed the artificial creation of element 114, which was first synthesized nearly a decade ago by Russian scientists.

But if Berkeley scientists weren’t the first to make it, why is it so exciting? Because of the so-called “island of stability.” Basically, the island is a group of superheavy elements whose half-lives last longer than the period at the end of this sentence. Wait, no, wrong analogy—those whose half-lives could hopefully be on much more useful time scales compared to most already-named superheavy elements.

But since the Berkeley group only confirmed the discovery made by an earlier group, they won’t get naming rights. So don’t expect any new Californiums or Berkeliums to show up on the front page of the papers sometime soon.

Image Source: invictuzz688 under Creative Commons
Superheavy Element 114 Confirmed: A Stepping Stone to the Island of Stability [LBNL]
Berkeley Lab confirms new superheavy element [SF Business Times]

While it’s true that Edison did, in fact, invent the phonograph, the first machine to both record sound and reproduce it as sound, it was a rightfully spiteful Parisian typesetter by the name of Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville who was the first guy to record sound at all, if only as a visual representation in lines and squiggles. Finally, after searching for years for the original gift of sound and vision, an American audio historian, David Giovannoni, recently got a hold of a “pristine” one of these phonautograms, apparently the audio equivalent of the “holy grail.”

Giovannoni then sent this phonautogram to Lawrence Lab so the scientists up there could try to make the Berkeley hills come alive with the sound of some lady singing “Au Clair de la Lune”; a folk song not to be confused with the Debussy piece from the end of “Ocean’s 11.” This, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell did gladly, using a “virtual stylus” that took the optical image from the phonautogram and was able to play it back. Because the recording eventually translated into accurate sound, Leon Scott’s phonautogram–which predates Edison’s phonograph schtick by almost two decades–officially wins as the first ever recording of sound.

So take that, Thomas Alva Edison, you “Birth of a Nation”-loving, recognition Nazi! The hills have eyes and they’re watching you.

Thomas Edison [Wikipedia]
Older than Edison? [Naples Daily News]

The Department of Energy announced Tuesday that the Lawrence Berkeley Lab will host a new energy consortium in the Bay Area. Two other research centers will include the Oak Ridge Lab in Tennessee and a lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

How much is DoE pledging to give Cal? How about $125 million over the next five years? Add to that the $500 million the university got from BP, and you know that the university can afford some bling now.

Joining the university in these efforts will be UC Davis, the Livermore Lab, Stanfurd and Sandia National Laboratories.

And no matter how much people hate the BP deal, or may hate this new deal, you’ve got to admit–$625 million just for bioscience research is huge. If the university can find some sensible alternative to fossil fuels, then maybe we’ll see student fees drop. Right. That’s as likely as Stanfurd giving Cal more tickets for the Big Game, meaning not very likely.

Biofuels Group Secures U.S. Grant [Daily Cal]
New project puts UC Berkeley at forefront of biofuels research [SF Gate]