Thursday, Oct. 16, 1997
The Cassini probe was launched successfully Wednesday at 4:43 a.m. EDT after a two-day delay caused by weather problems. Cassini, scheduled to rendezvous with Saturn in 2004, will orbit Saturn and its moons for four years and deposit the European Space Agency's Huygens probe on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Lab scientists led the development of two scientific sensors that will provide key measurements of the space environment around Saturn. |
UC chemist wins Nobel Prize; shares with two others
Paul Boyer of the University of California, Los Angeles, is a 1997 recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He shares the award with John Walker of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, and Jens Skou of Aarhus University in Denmark. The three scientists won for their pioneering work on how the body's cells store and transfer energy.
Boyer and Walker were honored for their discovery of the process that makes adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a molecule that cells use to store energy. Skou discovered an enzyme that works with ATP to regulate the concentration of sodium and potassium inside a cell.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded half of the $1 million prize to Boyer and Walker, and the other half to Skou.
Walking Month participation up this year
The final figures for Walking Month are in. The bad news is the Wellness Center did not meet its goals this year for the number of participants and hours walked. The good news is the figures are better than last year's.
The center set ambitious goals of getting more than 2,000 employees involved and logging at least 48,000 walking hours. The figures show that 1,351 University of California and contractor employees participated this year, logging about 27,670 hours of walking. Still, the figures are an improvement from last year's event, when only about 1,000 employees took part and logged less than 20,000 hours.
The winner of the Marathon-in-a-Month drawing and recipient of a "Walking in Good Company" T-shirt is Carol Ann Martz of Training and Development (HR-6). Teams from Air Quality (ESH-17) and Nonproliferation and International Security (NIS) Facility Management Unit 75 tied for the team competition. Both will share in a luncheon Oct. 31 catered by Wellness Center staff.
--Ternel N. Martinez
Officials continue to look for funding sources
for shuttle service
The fledgling Northern New Mexico Park and Ride program has about $1.25 million coming its way contingent on President Bill Clinton's signature. But it's not enough money to restart the commuter-bus service that was well received by Laboratory employees and called largely successful by state highway officials.
In the meantime, state officials are continuing to look for additional funding sources.
A joint U.S. Senate-House committee on Oct. 9 approved a $396.3 million bill for transportation projects nationwide and sent it to the president for his signature. New Mexico got $7.75 million, a little more than one-third of the roughly $19.5 million state and local government agencies and a Roswell bus-manufacturing company asked for, according to Brian Ainsworth of the state Highway and Transportation Department.
Ainsworth coordinated the two-week-long Northern New Mexico Park-and-Ride demonstration project in August that drew 11,564 riders between Los Alamos, Española and Santa Fe.
Of the $7.75 million the state of New Mexico would receive, $4.75 million is for state-government-funded projects, said Ainsworth. And $1.25 million is earmarked for park-and-ride programs. The cities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque each got $1 million to purchase buses or upgrade existing bus facilities.
"We got about half of what we requested and about a third for park-and ride," Ainsworth said of the state's award.
"We're going to utilize it as seed money. It's not enough money to get the program up and running. It's not enough money to lease buses," Ainsworth said of the $1.25 million for park-and-ride programs. "Now we need to go out and find the rest."
Ainsworth said it's unlikely the park-and-ride program can be resurrected before January at the earliest. "I don't see anything starting up before the first of the year because one of the pieces of this puzzle could be the Legislature -- something like a direct appropriation to run the park-and-ride on a yearly basis," he said.
Ainsworth also is scheduled to meet today with Tom Garcia, the Lab's director of institutional development, and next week with other Lab officials. He said the state is looking for guidance on how it can partner with the Lab to find additional funding sources. "I want to determine if there is a partnership that can be made to find some funding sources," said Ainsworth.
"I don't feel its right for LANL to foot the bill. I think LANL can participate in some way through a partnership with state government and the local entities in trying to find an alternative means of transportation," he said.
The park-and-ride program, he added, proved its benefit to the Lab in terms of transporting Lab employees to and from Santa Fe, Española and Pojoaque, reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and improving employee morale.
"Less stress leads to more productive, more motivated employees," said Ainsworth (see Aug. 15 Daily Newsbulletin).
Ainsworth said the state agency still is waiting to hear from the private Gas Research Institute on its grant request for funding for the park-and-ride program.
The state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department last month applied for a $1 million grant to purchase compressed natural-gas engines. If the state receives the grant, it also would be used as seed money, said Ainsworth, adding that the state has two years to spend the Gas Research Institute grant funds.
The Gas Research Institute is a cooperative program of the Department of Energy. The grant is designed to fund projects that provide new knowledge to further the development of natural-gas-vehicle products and technologies, increase the use of natural gas as a transportation fuel, and provide broadly dispersed benefits to gas consumers through the development of regional natural-gas-vehicle markets.
Louise Martinez of the state Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department is coordinating the grant request for the state.
Ainsworth said officials from the Federal Transit Administration have also begun an analysis of the park-and-ride program to help the state seek additional funding sources. "They want to see what we're impacting within the corridor to help us determine what types of national funding we can apply for," said Ainsworth. He added that there are transportation program funds contained within the federal welfare and Medicaid programs for which states can apply.
And highway officials will continue talking to local government officials in Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Española seeking their support of the park-and-ride program.
Highway officials have said that a majority of the people who rode buses between the three cities during the demonstration project were Laboratory -- about 7,000 of the 11,564 commuters -- or Los Alamos County government employees.
Assuming the state receives the funding for park-and-ride programs, it still has to find money to pay for day-to-day expenses such as salaries and benefits for drivers, mechanics and other personnel, insurance and fuel.
Ainsworth said it would cost about $950,000 a year in operating expenses to run a workweek park-and-ride service. The state is projecting to generate about $450,000 from rider fares, private donations and advertising; it would have to make up the difference.
Ainsworth also has said the highway department would need between 60 and 90 days to select a contractor to operate the service, create permanent park-and-ride lots, hire and train new drivers, firm up route schedules and meet all other federal and state mass-transit requirements, if funds are found to restart the program.
During the demonstration project, the park-and-ride service cost riders $1 each way. State and local governments spent $100,000 to fund the pilot project.
Johnson Controls World Services Inc. vans transported Lab employees from the Technical Area 3 dropoff point to other technical areas and picked them up at the end of the day to catch the bus home.
--Steve Sandoval
The Española Ranger District reports that it has begun prescribed-fire operations in Los Alamitos Mesa and Garcia Canyon. A total of 100 acres will be burned over the next few days, weather and wind conditions permitting. Prescribed fires are used to reduce the risk of wildfires. For more information, call Claudia Standish at 753-7331. |
'Reflections, Lessons Learned and Thanks" Director Sig Hecker, who steps down as Lab director Nov. 3, will focus on "Reflections, Lessons Learned and Thanks" during a colloquium Monday at 8:10 a.m. in the Administration Building Auditorium. The unclassified talk is open to badgeholders only. |
'The Global Impact of Science and Engineering' Charles K. Alexander, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at California State University in Northridge will speak on "The Global Impact of Science and Engineering" Tuesday at 1:10 p.m. in the Physics Building Auditorium. Alexander, the 1997 president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), N.Y., disputes the claim by some that society is into a new great age call the "information age." Rather, he believes the new great age is the "age of the engineer and the scientist." He notes that technology is expanding so rapidly and pervasively that "no area of our society will escape being profoundly impacted." The talk is open to the public. |
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