200 liters of condensed liquid nitrogen (LN₂) were delivered to Berkeley’s Condensed Matter Lab this past Monday. Sent to retrieve the 400lb dewar from the loading dock but faced with a non-working elevator, an enterprising young lab student decided to carry it down the stairs. Gravity is a harsh mistress.

If things had turned out differently, they could have been scraping his remains off the walls with a spatula. At Texas A&M in January a lab was badly damaged when someone ignored the Ideal Gas Law, removed the pressure valve and rupture disk off an old (LN₂) tank and filled the remaining holes with metal plugs. "How to Tell a True Lab Story" talks about a similar incident. LN₂ is good for more than just blowing up a school (or, um a watermelon), though: Spanish Chef Ferran Adrià uses it to create dishes at his restaurant. Previously on MeFI: How to make LN₂ ice cream (careful!) and unwise science experiments.
posted by zarq on Aug 18, 2006 - 27 comments

Images of Native Americans, from UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, is comprehensive online exhibit of over 400 years of text and images of Native American history. [via a Berkleyan article that has sample images and more info]
posted by kirkaracha on Aug 18, 2003 - 8 comments

Weblogs Goin' To Skool Overview, schedule, and resources posted for that potentially infamous UC Berkeley J-school class on weblogs.
posted by peterme on Aug 7, 2002 - 7 comments

Online Audio Recordings: UC Berkeley Lectures and Events Including speeches by James Baldwin, Walter Blum, Malcolm X, and Noam Chomsky, to name a few.
posted by RobertLoch on Apr 13, 2002 - 13 comments