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Berkeley Lab Physicist Challenges Speed of Gravity Claim

Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory has not yet been proven. A scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says the announcement by two scientists, widely reported this past January, about the speed of gravity was wrong.Stuart Samuel, a participating scientist with the Theory Group of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, has demonstrated that an “ill-advised” assumption made in the earlier claim led to an unwarranted conclusion.

A fiery debate about volcanoes

In a Perspective in the May 9 issue of Science, geochemist Don DePaolo and geodynamicist Michael Manga defend a fundamental assumption of Earth science, the mantle plume model of hotspots, against an outbreak of seismic skepticism.
DePaolo and Manga are members of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Earth Sciences Division and the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science. DePaolo studies the chemical signatures of geological structures like the lava beneath the island of Hawaii. Manga studies volcanism and other fluid processes using a variety of techniques, including physical models.

Microgel polymer beads may provide general vehicle for vaccines, gene therapy

A simple method of shuttling proteins into cells via microscopic polymer beads shows promise as a general way of carrying vaccines or bits of DNA for gene therapy, according to chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The polymer beads are imbedded with a protein – a vaccine antigen, for example – and made large enough to attract the attention of the immune system’s scavenger cells, which engulf them and try to digest them with acid.

A new branch on the tree of life

The family tree of life has a newly discovered branch. Genetic studies comparing mitochondrial DNA have revealed that what has long been thought to be the group from which insects arose, the Collembola — wingless hexapods (or “six legs”) commonly called springtails — turns out not to be closely related to insects after all. Instead, these creatures belong to a separate evolutionary lineage that predates even the separation of insects and crustaceans.