The Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), recently launched the “You Belong in Quantum Series!” in collaboration with the four other U.S. Department of Energy National QIS Research Centers. The initiative’s January 2024 webinar featured distinguished leaders in the field.
The National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), which is led by Berkeley Lab, has been extended for five more years with $75 million in funding fromDOE. NAWI will continue its contributions to helping decarbonize the water and wastewater sectors through investments in technologies that enhance the efficient use of energy for water use, treatment, and distribution.
Researchers have taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state – an exotic quantum phenomenon that could help researchers advance quantum computing and energy-efficient electronics.
Researchers have developed an automated workflow that could accelerate the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and other useful products. The new approach could enable real-time reaction analysis and identify new chemical-reaction products much faster than current laboratory methods.
For millions of years, underground fungi have lived in symbiosis with plant roots. Researchers have been able to study both sides of this interaction up close, using RNA sequencing to understand gene expression: one of the first cross-kingdom spatially-resolved transcriptomics studies to date.
Researchers have used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to make the largest 3D map of our universe and world-leading measurements of dark energy, the mysterious cause of its accelerating expansion
Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants. Exploring sugarcane’s genetic code could help researchers develop more resilient and productive crops, with implications for both sugar production and biofuels.
Fungi naturally produce all the ingredients needed for a cruelty-free meat substitute. Our scientists are exploring how tuning the genomes of mushrooms and molds can transform these food sources into gourmet, nutrient-packed meals made with minimal processing and a light environmental footprint.
High-temperature superconductor magnets have the potential to lower the costs of operating particle accelerators and enable powerful new technologies like fusion reactors. But quenches – the sudden, destructive events wherein a part of the material loses superconductivity – are a major barrier to their deployment.
A greater understanding of how plants and microbes work together to store vast amounts of atmospheric carbon in the soil will help in the design of better bioenergy crops for the fight against climate change. Deciphering the mechanics of this mutually beneficial relationship is, however, challenging as conditions in nature are extremely difficult for scientists to replicate in the laboratory. To address this challenge, researchers created fabricated ecosystems or EcoFABs.
Five of the world’s leading research and education (R&E) networking organizations have joined forces to form MetrANOVA, a consortium for Advancing Network Observation, Visualization, and Analysis. Together, founding members Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), GÉANT, GlobalNOC at Indiana University, Internet2, and Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) operate and connect a dizzying number of national, regional, and local R&E networks — yet representing a portion of the decentralized fabric linking scientific researchers in hundreds of countries worldwide. MetrANOVA’s goal is to develop and disseminate common network measurement and analysis tools, tactics, and techniques that can be applied throughout the global R&E community.
Wetlands are Earth’s largest natural source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. A research team analyzed wetland methane emissions data across the entire Boreal-Arctic region and found that these emissions have increased approximately nine percent since 2002.
For more than 50 years, the National Hurricane Center has used the Saffir-Simpson Windscale to communicate the risk of property damage; it labels a hurricane on a scale from Category 1 (wind speeds between 74 - 95 mph) to Category 5 (wind speeds of 158 mph or greater). But as increasing ocean temperatures contribute to ever more intense and destructive hurricanes, climate scientists wondered whether the open-ended Category 5 is sufficient to communicate the risk of hurricane damage in a warming climate.
Research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and UC Davis sheds new light on how to access the sugars locked up in plants to produce petroleum-free fuels, chemicals, and medicines.
Scientists have developed “supramolecular ink,” a new 3D-printable OLED (organic light-emitting diode) material made of inexpensive, Earth-abundant elements instead of costly scarce metals.
Scientists have developed “supramolecular ink,” a new 3D-printable OLED (organic light-emitting diode) material made of inexpensive, Earth-abundant elements instead of costly scarce metals.
Researchers at the FLEXLAB® facility, a unique buildings testbed at Berkeley Lab, are helping the buildings and utilities sectors and U.S. policymakers develop new technologies for a zero-low-emissions grid.
New calculations from Google DeepMind grow Berkeley Lab's Materials Project, an open-access resource that scientists use to develop new materials for future technologies. Some of the computations were used alongside data from the Materials Project to test A-Lab, a facility at Berkeley Lab where artificial intelligence guides robots in making new materials.
With today’s fast and automated analysis tools, the field of biology is bursting at the seams with datasets about gene sequences and expression in the microbiomes around us – and inside us.
A research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed a high-performance coating material that self-assembles from 2D nanosheets, and which could significantly extend the shelf life of electronics, energy storage devices, health & safety products, and more. The researchers are the first to successfully scale up nanomaterial synthesis into useful materials for manufacturing and commercial applications.
The Quantum Systems Accelerator's summer camp (QCaMP) for high school students in New Mexico and California continues to evolve and grow. Under the 2023 Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) Pathway Summer School initiative, the DOE Office of Science awarded new funding to expand QCaMP's curricula and host students on-site at Berkeley Lab and Sandia Labs in 2024.
The National Science Foundation has awarded up to $21.4 million for the design of telescopes for CMB-S4, an international experiment that will study the cosmic microwave background and help us understand the beginning, history, and makeup of the universe. Berkeley Lab leads the project for DOE and also plays a lead role in technology development.
The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is proud to announce that it has supercharged the current and future bandwidth for four of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) national laboratories and user facilities, unleashing 400 Gigabit per second (400G) capability for Argonne National Laboratory, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. With this boost in capacity, scientists can process, analyze, visualize, share, and store the enormous quantities of research data at speeds up to four times faster than previously possible.
The Quantum System Accelerator (QSA) researchers at Berkeley Lab conducted a series of experiments with a new type of layered 2D metal (TMD), finding connections in electronic behavior such as itinerant magnetism and superconductivity, which might potentially help fabricate complex superconducting quantum processors.
Astronomers have created a detailed atlas of almost 400,000 galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. The Siena Galaxy Atlas was primarily built from data gathered in preparation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) experiment and will be an invaluable tool for research into gravitational waves, dark matter, the structure of our universe, and how galaxies evolve.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have created multi-sensor systems that can map nuclear radiation in 3D in real-time. Researchers are now testing how to integrate their system with robots that can autonomously investigate radiation areas.
Through a novel approach detailed in Nature, a massive computational analysis of microbiome datasets more than doubled the number of known protein families. This is the first time protein structures have been used to help characterize the vast array of microbial “dark matter.”
Berkeley Lab will lead centers for the Hydrogen and Carbon Negative Energy Earthshots, initiatives to accelerate technological breakthroughs for clean energy and solutions to the climate crisis. The Center for Ionomer-based Water Electrolysis (CIWE) will investigate methods to improve the efficiency and durability of clean-hydrogen production, while RESTOR-C will develop better ways for plants and microbes to pull carbon from the atmosphere and lock it away in the soil.
Scientists have demonstrated “multielement ink” – the first “high-entropy” semiconductor that can be processed at low-temperature or room temperature. The new material could enable cost-effective and energy-efficient semiconductor manufacturing.
Researchers can use the radio-quiet far side of the moon to listen for a never-before-heard signal from the “Dark Ages” of the universe. The LuSEE-Night experiment will act as a pathfinder for future experiments, testing equipment and techniques in the harsh lunar environment.
Berkeley Lab scientists are accelerating and streamlining the process of engineering microbes to produce important compounds with commercial-ready efficiency.
Researchers developed a new battery material called disordered rock salt (DRX) that could pave the way for replacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles at a faster rate. DRX cathodes could be ready to commercialize in just a few years.
Experts at Berkeley Lab finished winding more than 2000 kilometers of superconducting wire into cables for new magnets that will help upgrade the Large Hadron Collider and the search for new physics.
Researchers from Berkeley Lab are co-leading a project to explore the creation of a direct air capture facility that uses cutting-edge technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in California’s Southern San Joaquin Valley.
A team of Berkeley Lab researchers has recently demonstrated a more effective technique for creating quantum emitters using pulsed ion beams, which could lead to their use in a quantum internet and for sensing radiation.
In a new Q&A, microelectronics expert and CHiPPS Director Ricardo Ruiz shares his perspective on keeping pace with Moore’s Law in the decades to come through a revolutionary technique called extreme ultraviolet lithography.
The Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) at Berkeley Lab celebrated the first five years of operations and its renewal with a two-day hybrid summit in May 2023, bringing together staff, alums, testbed users, and colleagues.
Ever since gene editing became feasible, researchers and health officials have sought tools that can quickly and reliably distinguish genetically modified organisms from those that are naturally occurring. Now, such tools exist.
In rooms where smoking has taken place regularly, tobacco's imprint lingers on indoor surfaces, even long after regular smoking has stopped. The leftover residues, known as thirdhand smoke, can be a long-term source of indoor pollutants. New research from a team led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) zeroes in on carpets as an especially potent – and difficult to clean – reservoir of tobacco contaminants.
In a study published today, researchers successfully engineered microbes to make biological alternatives for the starting ingredients in an infinitely recyclable plastic known as poly(diketoenamine), or PDK.
Berkeley Lab and Genentech are collaborating to make the next generation of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for drug delivery. Combining structural biology with cutting edge pharmaceutical science, the team is designing LNPs that can precisely deliver vaccines and therapeutics to target tissues while improving the product’s shelf life and duration of action.
Quantum information processors that operate with ternary logic (qutrits) offer significant potential advantages in quantum simulation and error correction, as well as the ability to improve specific quantum algorithms and applications. Building on previous R&D with qutrits at the Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT), the paper's experimental team, led by a promising UC Berkeley graduate student, successfully entangled two transmon qutrits with gate fidelities significantly higher than in previously reported works.
A new study by Lab scientists finds that as rising global temperatures shift snow to rain, mountains across the Northern Hemisphere will be hotspots for extreme rainfall events that could trigger floods and landslides – potentially impacting a quarter of the world’s population.
For the first time, researchers have developed a genome-scale way to map the regulatory role of transcription factors, proteins that play a key role in gene expression and determining a plant’s physiological traits. Their work reveals unprecedented insights into gene regulatory networks and identifies a new library of DNA parts that can be used to optimize plants for bioenergy and agriculture.
An international team led by research scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that clean energy microgrids offer a better and cheaper solution for protecting California communities from wildfire-related outages, compared to conventional microgrids.
An innovative, decade-long experiment in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains shows carbon stocks buried deep underground are vulnerable to climate change. The findings have implications for mitigating global warming through the natural carbon sinks provided by soil and forests which capture 25% of all carbon emissions.
The universe is big, and it’s getting bigger. To study dark energy, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of our universe, scientists are using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to map more than 40 million galaxies, quasars, and stars. Today, the collaboration publicly released its first batch of data, with nearly 2 million objects for researchers to explore.