Laboratories

The Energy Department said Tuesday it had fined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the nation's two nuclear weapons design centers, $200,000 for deficiencies in its program to protect workers from exposure to toxic beryllium dust. A consent order issued by the Energy Department's Office of Health, Safety and Security outlined a series of breakdowns at the lab, including failure to adequately control worker exposure, perform hazard assessments in buildings, measure the amount of beryllium in work areas and effectively train employees who work with the metal.

I am the chief engineer for flight mechanics at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA center operated under federal government contract by the California Institute of Technology. My responsibilities include technical oversight and review of all aspects of spacecraft dynamics, trajectory design, mission design and navigation for all missions at JPL from the earliest studies to the completion of flight operations. I also serve on several review boards for other NASA missions outside of JPL. But today, I will be at the Supreme Court listening to my lawyer argue against the acting solicitor general of the United States.

Thousands of people have tried, in their own quixotic ways, to help BP protect wildlife and clean up crude in the Gulf of Mexico after the worst oil disaster in the country's history. There were those who shaved their dogs and sent the hair south for the company to use to soak up the oil. And there were inventors who flew to Louisiana hoping that their cleanup gadgets would catch BP's eye. A Taiwanese billionaire retrofitted a giant tanker to skim oil from the ocean. And then there's Jack Rudloe, who's determined to protect vulnerable and important sea life — and his business — all on his own. Rudloe, 67, wants to save the gulf's mollusks, shrimp, crabs, seahorses and other invertebrates from what he sees as potential extinction.

Donald P. Shiley, who was the co-inventor of an artificial valve that revolutionized heart surgery and who later used his fortune to support medical research, the arts and education, has died. He was 90. Shiley died July 31 in San Diego after several years of failing health, including the eye disorder macular degeneration. Shiley donated tens of millions of dollars to San Diego's blue-chip institutions: the Old Globe Theatre, UC San Diego, KPBS public radio and television, Scripps Clinic and the University of San Diego.

Peering up into tree branches 100 feet above the floor of the jungle, Angela Maldonado spots a family of monkeys where someone with a less practiced eye would see nothing but a maze of brown and green foliage. "They're intelligent, charismatic creatures that express happiness, pain and grief. They make you feel what they are feeling," Maldonado said, squinting up at the rain forest canopy outside this sweltering Amazon port city. "They're a lot like us." Such empathy explains why Maldonado, a 36-year-old primate conservationist, has sought, as her lifework, to keep Colombia's night monkeys out of the hands of indigenous hunters who sell them to medical laboratories for infectious disease research.

At 5:30 a.m., even before her first cup of coffee, research director/data wrangler Eleanor McDonnell Feit stumbles from her bed to the computer. On her desktop Wednesday morning were the results of a night's worth of computer crunching on a fresh mountain of data about the 2010 FIFA World Cup. "Sometimes it gives an error message, and that's bad," said Feit, who didn't care who won Tuesday's tense Spain vs. Portugal match. Instead, Feit, director of research at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, and her colleagues care whether the research model they devised to predict ESPN online-viewership patterns worked.

"Hello, from the children of planet Earth!" Someday, these friendly words might greet beings from another world! No one knows whether life exists anywhere else but Earth. Even if it does, no one knows whether any alien life forms might be intelligent. Or whether they might be advanced enough to have space travel. But, what if . . . ? Let's go back to 1977. The United States launches two robotic spacecraft. Robotic means they have no people in them. The spacecraft are named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. They are going to explore the outer planets of our solar system.

A year before a UCLA staff research assistant was fatally burned in a lab fire, a graduate student was seriously injured in a similar accident that university officials failed to report to state regulators, records released Friday show. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health this week fined UCLA $23,900 for the earlier incident, which occurred in November 2007 -- 13 months before Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji suffered burns that took her life and prompted a campuswide review of lab safety.

There has been a lot of speculation recently that Toyota's problems with sudden acceleration may be caused by a problem in the vehicles' electronics systems. The "electronics" includes millions of lines of software running on the automobiles' computers. As The Times reported on March 3, Toyota's chief engineer testified to Congress that the company has done extensive testing on its cars' electronics and believes they are not the cause of the sudden acceleration. Having owned a Toyota myself, I have always been a fan of what I perceived to be the automaker's high standards for quality.

A French judge issued an arrest warrant Monday for cyclist Floyd Landis, disgraced and stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title because of doping, in connection with a computer hacking case that occurred as he defended himself. The court wants to question Landis about allegations that he or someone involved with the cyclist hacked into the computer system of the French national anti-doping lab. Landis on Monday denied he hacked anything and said no one has served any warrant against him, though he wasn't sure whether his former coach, Arnie Baker, had received one. It was allegedly a computer registered to Baker that is associated with the case.