In this Q&A, Berkeley Lab physicist Spencer Klein, who has been a part of the IceCube collaboration since 2004, discusses Berkeley Lab's historic contributions to IceCube, and IceCube's contributions to science.
Competing in a fictitious high-stakes scenario, a group of scientists at Berkeley Lab bested two dozen other teams in a months-long, data-driven scavenger hunt for simulated radioactive materials in a virtual urban environment. The goal of this event was both to improve the detection methods that could be applied to actual threats involving nuclear materials, and to create a platform to virtually vet out these methods.
A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national labs, is leveraging powerful supercomputers to portray the impact of high-frequency ground motion on thousands of representative different-sized buildings spread out across the California region.
An international team reported on the results of a large-scale field study to identify the core microbial community for the maize rhizosphere. The work partially replicates earlier trials to identify soil microbes that colonize plants and which can be associated with particular traits.
Bioelectrochemical systems combine the best of both worlds – microbial cells with inorganic materials – to make fuels and other energy-rich chemicals with unrivaled efficiency. Yet technical difficulties have kept them impractical anywhere but in a lab. Now researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a novel nanoscale membrane that could address these issues and pave the way for commercial scale-up.
Six scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science to receive significant funding for research through its Early Career Research Program.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab are currently developing a web-based search engine for scientific data, called Science Search. The team is also building innovative machine learning tools to pull contextual information from scientific datasets and automatically generate missing metadata tags for each raw and simulated data files. As a proof-of-concept, the team is working with staff at the Molecular Foundry, to demonstrate the concepts of Science Search on the images captured by the facility's instruments.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) based at Berkeley Lab have pioneered a new way to synthesize DNA sequences through a creative use of enzymes that promises to be faster, cheaper, and more accurate. DNA synthesis is a fundamental tool in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, in which organisms can be engineered to do things like decompose plastic and manufacture biofuels and medicines. This discovery could dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
Researchers have found a way to convert nanoparticle-coated microscopic beads into lasers smaller than red blood cells. These microlasers, which convert infrared light into light at higher frequencies, are among the smallest continuously emitting lasers of their kind ever reported and can constantly and stably emit light for hours at a time, even when submerged in biological fluids such as blood serum.
Experiments conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helped to confirm that samples of interplanetary particles – collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere and believed to originate from comets – contain dust leftover from the initial formation of the solar system.
A team of scientists working at Berkeley Lab has confirmed a special property known as “chirality” – which potentially could be exploited to transmit and store data in a new way – in nanometers-thick samples of multilayer materials that have a disordered structure.
After an international search, Stephen D. “Steve” Kevan has been named the new director of the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Berkeley Lab works with industry to push superinsulating windows into marketplace
What began nearly a decade ago as a Berkeley Lab Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) proposal is now a reality, and it is already changing the way scientists run experiments at the Advanced Light Source—and, eventually, other light sources across the U.S. Department of Energy complex—by enabling real-time streaming of ptychographic image data in a production environment.
Researchers from Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division, the University of Texas at Dallas and Tianjin Normal University have developed an algorithmic model that enhances the image reconstruction capabilities of an algorithmic framework and computer software used to reconstruct millions of phases of ptychographic image data per second.
A team led by Berkeley Lab researchers has enlisted powerful supercomputers to calculate a quantity, known as the “nucleon axial coupling” or gA, that is central to our understanding of a neutron’s lifetime.
Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to use machine learning to dramatically accelerate the design of microbes that produce biofuel.
Researchers working at Berkeley Lab coupled graphene, a monolayer form of carbon, with thin layers of magnetic materials like cobalt and nickel to produce exotic behavior in electrons that could be useful for next-generation computing applications.
An international team led by scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley discovered how to exploit defects in nanoscale and microscale diamonds and potentially enhance the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging and nuclear magnetic resonance systems while eliminating the need for their costly and bulky superconducting magnets.
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), have developed a workflow that enables large-scale, genome-wide assays of gene importance across many conditions. The study, “Mutant Phenotypes for Thousands of Bacterial Genes of Unknown Function,” has been published in the journal Nature and is by far the largest functional genomics study of bacteria ever published.
The Planck Team—including researchers in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Computational Research and Physics divisions—have been awarded the 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize.
The world’s cutting-edge particle accelerators are pushing the extremes in high-brightness beams and ultrashort pulses to explore matter in new ways. To optimize their performance – and to prepare for next-generation facilities that will push these extremes further – scientists have devised a new tool that can measure how bright these beams are, even for pulses that last only quadrillionths or even quintillionths of a second.
Structural model of physiological tau-microtubule interactions sheds light on neurological diseases that correlate with their disruption
The Project Jupyter team has been honored with an ACM Software System Award for developing a tool that has had a lasting influence on computing. Project Jupyter evolved from IPython, an effort pioneered by Fernando Pérez, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division.
Berkeley Lab’s Julian Borrill has been elected co-spokesperson for the CMB-S4 collaboration, the next-generation ground-based experiment to study the Cosmic Microwave Background.
An international team, led by Berkeley Lab scientists, has demonstrated a breakthrough in the design and function of nanoparticles that could make solar panels more efficient by converting light usually missed by solar cells into usable energy.
A new study calls for the U.S. to step up its laser R&D efforts to better compete with major overseas efforts to build large, high-power laser systems, and notes progress and milestones at the Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center and other sites.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with public and private partners, has released the most comprehensive publicly available database yet of U.S. wind turbine locations and characteristics. The United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) will allow unparalleled ability for government agencies and others to make planning decisions.
Research appearing today in Nature Communications finds useful new information-handling potential in samples of tin(II) sulfide (SnS), a candidate "valleytronics" transistor material that might one day enable chipmakers to pack more computing power onto microchips.
Scientists have decoded faint distortions in the patterns of the universe’s earliest light to map huge tubelike structures invisible to our eyes – known as filaments – that serve as superhighways for delivering matter to dense hubs such as galaxy clusters.
JGI has developed capabilities to move beyond generating a DNA sequence to understanding gene functions. Through the JGI’s Emerging Technologies Opportunity Program, researchers aim to develop an optimized cell-free platform to help speed up the design-build-test-analyze cycle in synthetic biology.
Scientists have directly measured the increasing greenhouse effect of methane at the Earth’s surface for the first time. A research team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) tracked a rise in the warming effect of methane – one of the most important greenhouse gases for the Earth’s atmosphere – over a 10-year period at a DOE field observation site in northern Oklahoma.
A team led by Berkeley Lab scientists has developed a process for creating ultrathin, self-assembling sheets of synthetic materials that can function like designer flypaper in selectively binding with viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. The new platform could potentially be used to inactivate or detect pathogens.
Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to print 3-D structures composed entirely of liquids. Using a modified 3-D printer, they injected threads of water into silicone oil — sculpting tubes made of one liquid within another liquid.
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley decided to analyze the cost, energy, and environmental implications of a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles operating in Manhattan. They found that shared automated electric vehicles, or SAEVs, could get the job done at a lower cost – by an order of magnitude – than present-day taxis while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a new enzyme that will enable microbial production of a renewable alternative to petroleum-based toluene, a widely used octane booster in gasoline that has a global market of 29 million tons per year.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have discovered that as plants develop they craft their root microbiome, favoring microbes that consume very specific metabolites. Their study could help scientists identify ways to enhance the soil microbiome for improved carbon storage and plant productivity.
COSMIC, a next-generation X-ray beamline now operating at Berkeley Lab, brings together a unique set of capabilities to measure the properties of materials at the nanoscale. It allows scientists to probe working batteries and other active chemical reactions, and to reveal new details about magnetism and correlated electronic materials.
California relies on the Sierra Nevada snowpack for a significant portion of its water needs, yet scientists understand very little about how future changes in snowpack volume and timing will influence surface water and groundwater. Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are developing an advanced hydrologic model to study how climate change might affect California watersheds.
A new particle detector design proposed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab could greatly broaden the search for dark matter – which makes up 85 percent of the total mass of the universe yet we don’t know what it’s made of – into an unexplored realm.
Recognizing that the issues of water and energy are critically interdependent, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is launching a new research institute to focus resources on its growing portfolio of projects for water innovation.
In Nature Biotechnology, an international team including JGI scientists presents a reference catalog of rumen microbial genomes and isolates, one of the largest targeted cultivation and sequencing projects to date.
A new study, which included experiments at Berkeley Lab, suggests that water may be more common than expected at extreme depths approaching 400 miles and possibly beyond – within Earth’s lower mantle. The study explored microscopic pockets of a trapped form of crystallized water molecules in a sampling of diamonds.
How will the farms of the future feed a projected 9.8 billion people by 2050? Berkeley Lab’s “smart farm” project marries microbiology and machine learning in an effort to reduce the need for chemical fertilizers and enhance soil carbon uptake, thus improving the long-term viability of the land while increasing crop yields.
Berkeley Lab and Joint Genome Institute researchers took one of the most popular clustering approaches in modern biology—Markov Clustering algorithm—and modified it to run efficiently and at scale on supercomputers. Their algorithm achieved a previously impossible feat: clustering a 70 million node and 68 billion edge biological network in hours.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab identified thirdhand smoke, the toxic residues that linger on indoor surfaces and in dust long after a cigarette has been extinguished, as a health hazard nearly 10 years ago. Now a new study has found that it also increases lung cancer risk in mice.
An innovative R&D project led by Berkeley Lab researchers that combines cybersecurity, machine learning algorithms and commercially available power system sensor technology to better protect the electric power grid has sparked interest from U.S. utilities, power companies and government officials.
An international team led by researchers at Berkeley Lab used advanced techniques in electron microscopy to show how the ratio of materials that make up a lithium-ion battery electrode affects its structure at the atomic level, and how the surface is very different from the rest of the material.
While it may be the era of supercomputers and “big data,” without smart methods to mine all that data, it’s only so much digital detritus. Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have come up with a novel machine learning method that enables scientists to derive insights from systems of previously intractable complexity in record time.
Scientists have used experiments at Berkeley Lab to retrace the chemical steps leading to the creation of complex hydrocarbons in space. They showed pathways to forming 2-D carbon-based nanostructures in a mix of heated gases.
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