UC Science Today

What exactly are scientists looking for by using the world’s largest particle accelerator? As it turns out, they’re looking for anything. Marjorie Shapiro is a collaborator at the Large Hadron Collider and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She says that aside from the high profile experiments like the Higgs boson and dark matter, there’s a lot of other physics going on as well.

"In some sense, it’s like a telescope. You build a telescope and then you decide what are you going to point it at and you can do lots of different science depending on what you point it at. We collect a lot of data from these proton collisions, and we can look at the data in different ways in order to understand different things about physics."

Shapiro explains that the protons are smashed together in order to create particles that existed in the early universe. But she also says that you never know what you might find.

"I hope that in a couple of years, we’ll be able to come back and say, we found something that none of us expected to see."

What exactly are scientists looking for by using the world’s largest particle accelerator? As it turns out, they’re looking for anything. Marjorie Shapiro is a collaborator at the Large Hadron Collider and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She says that aside from the high profile experiments like the Higgs boson and dark matter, there’s a lot of other physics going on as well.

"In some sense, it’s like a telescope. You build a telescope and then you decide what are you going to point it at and you can do lots of different science depending on what you point it at. We collect a lot of data from these proton collisions, and we can look at the data in different ways in order to understand different things about physics."

Shapiro explains that the protons are smashed together in order to create particles that existed in the early universe. But she also says that you never know what you might find.

"I hope that in a couple of years, we’ll be able to come back and say, we found something that none of us expected to see."

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detailed how supercomputers can be used to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain side effects. Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab, says having a high tech process like this in place early on could not only save lives, it would save billions of dollars.

"The whole basis of the project was to address the need to predict the occurrence of adverse side effects in novel drugs. So, to provide some context for that – in order to develop a new drug, a pharmaceutical company has to expend about four billion dollars and it takes a decade to develop. And so that’s a huge number; and it’s sort of buried. So, each of the individual components that you need to bring a drug to market is in itself pretty expensive. For instance, a clinical trial that you need to test it in humans costs 100 million dollars. To manufacture and get a drug ready for market, that can be easily a billion."

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detailed how supercomputers can be used to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain side effects. Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab, says having a high tech process like this in place early on could not only save lives, it would save billions of dollars.

"The whole basis of the project was to address the need to predict the occurrence of adverse side effects in novel drugs. So, to provide some context for that – in order to develop a new drug, a pharmaceutical company has to expend about four billion dollars and it takes a decade to develop. And so that’s a huge number; and it’s sort of buried. So, each of the individual components that you need to bring a drug to market is in itself pretty expensive. For instance, a clinical trial that you need to test it in humans costs 100 million dollars. To manufacture and get a drug ready for market, that can be easily a billion."

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detailed how supercomputers can be used to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain side effects. Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab, says having a high tech process like this in place early on could not only save lives, it would save billions of dollars.

"The whole basis of the project was to address the need to predict the occurrence of adverse side effects in novel drugs. So, to provide some context for that – in order to develop a new drug, a pharmaceutical company has to expend about four billion dollars and it takes a decade to develop. And so that’s a huge number; and it’s sort of buried. So, each of the individual components that you need to bring a drug to market is in itself pretty expensive. For instance, a clinical trial that you need to test it in humans costs 100 million dollars. To manufacture and get a drug ready for market, that can be easily a billion."

A team of researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detailed how supercomputers can be used to identify proteins that cause medications to have certain side effects. Montiago LaBute, an applied statistician at the Lab, says having a high tech process like this in place early on could not only save lives, it would save billions of dollars.

"The whole basis of the project was to address the need to predict the occurrence of adverse side effects in novel drugs. So, to provide some context for that – in order to develop a new drug, a pharmaceutical company has to expend about four billion dollars and it takes a decade to develop. And so that’s a huge number; and it’s sort of buried. So, each of the individual components that you need to bring a drug to market is in itself pretty expensive. For instance, a clinical trial that you need to test it in humans costs 100 million dollars. To manufacture and get a drug ready for market, that can be easily a billion."

The field of artificial photosynthesis has taken a major leap forward, thanks to the development of a hybrid system that could one day reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy. Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley was part of a team that developed this breakthrough hybrid system. It combines nanotechnology and living organisms to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into valuable chemical products.

"What we've done is we've replaced the concept of a leaf, with two things. One is a nanotechnology platform that will allow us to do the light harvesting. And then, instead of using the rest of the infrastructure of the leaf to carry out the chemical reactions that form biomass, what we've done is we've invented an integrated system in which we can replace that leaf with fermentable bacteria, in this case, that will allow you to produce, not biomass, but any sort of chemical product that you would want …".

Including, Chang says, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

The field of artificial photosynthesis has taken a major leap forward, thanks to the development of a hybrid system that could one day reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy. Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley was part of a team that developed this breakthrough hybrid system. It combines nanotechnology and living organisms to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into valuable chemical products.

"What we've done is we've replaced the concept of a leaf, with two things. One is a nanotechnology platform that will allow us to do the light harvesting. And then, instead of using the rest of the infrastructure of the leaf to carry out the chemical reactions that form biomass, what we've done is we've invented an integrated system in which we can replace that leaf with fermentable bacteria, in this case, that will allow you to produce, not biomass, but any sort of chemical product that you would want …".

Including, Chang says, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

The field of artificial photosynthesis has taken a major leap forward, thanks to the development of a hybrid system that could one day reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy. Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley was part of a team that developed this breakthrough hybrid system. It combines nanotechnology and living organisms to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into valuable chemical products.

"What we've done is we've replaced the concept of a leaf, with two things. One is a nanotechnology platform that will allow us to do the light harvesting. And then, instead of using the rest of the infrastructure of the leaf to carry out the chemical reactions that form biomass, what we've done is we've invented an integrated system in which we can replace that leaf with fermentable bacteria, in this case, that will allow you to produce, not biomass, but any sort of chemical product that you would want …".

Including, Chang says, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.

The field of artificial photosynthesis has taken a major leap forward, thanks to the development of a hybrid system that could one day reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy. Christopher Chang of the University of California, Berkeley was part of a team that developed this breakthrough hybrid system. It combines nanotechnology and living organisms to capture carbon dioxide and convert it into valuable chemical products.

"What we've done is we've replaced the concept of a leaf, with two things. One is a nanotechnology platform that will allow us to do the light harvesting. And then, instead of using the rest of the infrastructure of the leaf to carry out the chemical reactions that form biomass, what we've done is we've invented an integrated system in which we can replace that leaf with fermentable bacteria, in this case, that will allow you to produce, not biomass, but any sort of chemical product that you would want …".

Including, Chang says, biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.