New images by Berkeley Lab scientists are providing the first visual evidence of a long-postulated physical link by which genes can receive mechanical cues from its microenvironment. Created by integrating six different imaging techniques, the images show thread-like cytofilaments reaching into and traversing a human breast cell's chromatin-packed nucleus.
In the January 20, 2017 issue of Science, University of Washington-led team, in collaboration with researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, reports that structural models have been generated for 12 percent of the protein families that had previously had no structural information available.
In 2015, Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, and Tsinghua University in Beijing formed the Berkeley Tsinghua Joint Research Center on Energy and Climate Change to develop scientifically based clean energy solutions and the next generation of leaders to champion those solutions. Now, that effort has received welcome support from Jim and Marilyn Simons in the amount of a $5 million donation.
An international team of researchers conducted a comparative genomic analysis to gain insights into the genome structure and evolution of the diatom Fragillariopsis cylindrus, as well as its role in the Southern Ocean.
Defects and jagged surfaces at the edges of nanosized platinum and gold particles are key hot spots for chemical reactivity, researchers confirmed using a unique infrared probe at Berkeley Lab.
For the second time in a year, ESnet and the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) have produced and released a library of short explanatory videos to help network engineers around the world gain basic knowledge, set up basic systems and drill down into areas of specific interest. In December, 15 videos detailing the Science DMZ network architecture were posted, covering the background and structure, specific designs, and techniques and technology.
Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Data Group is conducting new experiments to address common data needs in nuclear medicine, nuclear energy and fusion R&D, security, and counterproliferation work.
ARPA-E has awarded Berkeley Lab $4.6 million for two projects to “see” into the soil and ultimately develop crops that take carbon out of the atmosphere. One technology aims to use electrical current to image the root system. The other will use neutron scattering to measure the distribution of carbon and other elements in the soil.
A new study led by a Berkeley Lab research scientist highlights a literally shady practice in plant science that has in some cases underestimated plants’ rate of growth and photosynthesis, among other traits.
Scientists have enlisted the exotic properties of graphene to function like the film of an incredibly sensitive camera system in visually mapping tiny electric fields. They hope to enlist the new method to image electrical signaling networks in our hearts and brains.
A paper released December 15 during the American Geophysical Union fall meeting points to new evidence of human influence on extreme weather events. After examining observational and simulated temperature and heat indexes, the research team—which included three scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—concluded that two separate deadly heat waves that occurred in India and Pakistan in the summer of 2015 “were exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change.”
Scientists expect trees will advance upslope as global temperatures increase, shifting the tree line—the mountain zone where trees become smaller and eventually stop growing—to higher elevations. Subalpine forests will follow their climate up the mountain, in other words. But new research published Dec. 15 in the journal Global Change Biology suggests this may not hold true for two subalpine tree species of western North America.
A set of new laser systems and proposed upgrades at Berkeley Lab's BELLA Center will propel long-term plans for a more compact and affordable ultrahigh-energy particle collider.
Motivated by public hazards associated with contaminated sources of drinking water, a team of scientists has successfully developed and tested tiny, glowing crystals that can detect and trap heavy-metal toxins like mercury and lead.
A new study finds that environment and genetics determine relative abundance of specific microbes in the gut. The findings represent an attempt to untangle the forces that shape the gut microbiome, which plays an important role in keeping us healthy.
A combination of experiments, including X-ray studies at Berkeley Lab, revealed new details about pesky deposits that can stop chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes.
New technologies are giving researchers unprecedented opportunities to explore how the brain processes, utilizes, stores and retrieves information. But without a coherent strategy to analyze, manage and understand the data generated by these new tools, advancements in the field will be limited. Berkeley Lab researchers and their collaborators offer a plan to overcome these big data challenges.
Five scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
An international team of scientists is providing new insight into the process by which plants use light to split water and create oxygen. In experiments led by Berkeley Lab scientists, ultrafast X-ray lasers were able to capture atomic-scale images of a protein complex found in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria at room temperature.
Berkeley and Illinois researchers have bumped up crop productivity by as much as 20 percent by increasing the expression of genes that result in more efficient use of light in photosynthesis. Their work could potentially be used to help address the world’s future food needs.
A team from the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany has reverse engineered a biosynthetic pathway for more effective carbon fixation that is based on a new CO2-fixing enzyme that is nearly 20 times faster than the most prevalent enzyme in nature responsible for capturing CO2 in plants by using sunlight as energy.
Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a way to use optical microscopy to map thin-film solar cells in 3-D as they absorb photons.
Powerful supercomputer simulations of high-energy collisions between atomic cores provide new insights about the complex structure of a superhot fluid called the quark-gluon plasma.
Berkeley Lab scientists have found a way to engineer the atomic-scale chemical properties of a water-splitting catalyst for integration with a solar cell, and the result is a big boost to the stability and efficiency of artificial photosynthesis. The research comes out of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), established to develop a cost-effective method of turning sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel.
New findings suggest the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere has plateaued in recent years because Earth’s vegetation is grabbing more carbon from the air than in previous decades.
Berkeley Lab scientists have, for the first time, achieved both lasing and anti-lasing in a single device. Their findings lay the groundwork for developing a new type of integrated device with the flexibility to operate as a laser, an amplifier, a modulator, and a detector.
The 37 projects selected for the 2017 Community Science Program (CSP) of the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, “exploit DOE JGI’s experimental and analytical ‘omics’ capabilities and build our portfolio in key focus areas.”
Berkeley Lab researchers found that aberrant strands of genetic code have telltale signs that enable gateway proteins to recognize and block them from exiting the nucleus. Their findings shed light on a complex system of cell regulation that acts as a form of quality control for the transport of genetic information. A more complete picture of how genetic information gets expressed in cells is important in disease research.
One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado.
About a mile beneath the Earth’s surface in an old gold mine, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have built an observatory to study how rocks fracture. The knowledge they gain could ultimately help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate deployment of clean energy technologies.
A team of researchers working at Berkeley Lab has demonstrated infrared imaging of an organic semiconductor known for its electronics capabilities, revealing key nanoscale details about the nature of its crystal features and defects that affect its performance.
A new planetarium show is designed to immerse audiences in the search for dark matter, which we have so far detected only through its gravitational effects though it makes up most of the mass of the universe.
A new tool developed at Berkeley Lab allows researchers to interactively explore the hierarchical processes that happen in the brain when it is resting or performing tasks. Scientists also hope that the tool can shed some light on how neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s spread throughout the brain.
A research team led by Berkeley Lab material scientists has created a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate, breaking a size barrier that had been set by the laws of physics. The achievement could be a key to extending the life of Moore's Law.
Bionic enzymes got a needed boost in speed thanks to new research at the Berkeley Lab. By pairing a noble metal with a natural enzyme, scientists created a hybrid capable of churning out molecules at a rate comparable to biological counterparts.
A new data analysis/visualization toolkit developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is designed to help speed particle accelerator research and design by enabling in situ visualization and analysis of accelerator simulations at scale.
Berkeley Lab researchers have compiled a comprehensive genome-wide map of more than 80,000 enhancers considered relevant to human heart development and function. They went on to test two of the enhancers in mice, showing that when the enhancers were missing, the heart worked abnormally.
When the local water management agency closes your favorite beach due to unhealthy water quality, how reliable are the tests they base their decisions on? As it turns out, those tests, as well as the standards behind them, have not been updated in decades. Now scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a highly accurate, DNA-based method to detect and distinguish sources of microbial contamination in water.
A proposed upgrade to the Advanced Light Source -- which would provide new views of materials and chemistry at the nanoscale with X-ray beams up to 1,000 times brighter than possible now -- has cleared the first step in a Department of Energy approval process. The upgrade would enable new explorations of chemical reactions, battery performance, and biological processes.
In September two researchers from Africa visited Berkeley Lab as part of the State Department’s TechWomen—an international exchange that brings emerging women leaders in STEM from Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East together with their professional counterparts in the U.S.
The FLUXNET collaboration's most recent data release includes some of the longest continuous records of ecosystem data ever taken. The information has undergone extensive quality checks and is now publicly available for download, thanks partly to tools developed by Berkeley Lab scientists.
A unique collaboration between computers scientists and mathematicians from Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences group and Ciena, a major U.S. telecommunications equipment provider, has helped dramatically improve design cycle times for Ciena's high-speed optical networking components.
LUX-ZEPLIN, an ultrasensitive dark matter detector, has cleared a major approval milestone and is on track to begin its mile-deep hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs in 2020.
Researchers observed, for the first time, an exotic 3-D racetrack for electrons in ultrathin slices of a crystal they made at Berkeley Lab.
Edward Joseph Lofgren, a pioneering Berkeley Lab physicist who was a close associate of E.O. Lawrence and worked on the Manhattan Project, died Sept. 6 at age 102.
Elementary school science teaches us that in the sun, dark colors get hot while white stays cool. Now new research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found an exception: scientists have determined that certain dark pigments can stay just as cool as white by using fluorescence, the re-emission of absorbed light.
Scientists have successfully paired ferroelectric and ferrimagnetic materials so that their alignment can be controlled with a small electric field at near room temperatures, an achievement that could open doors to ultra low-power microprocessors, storage devices and next-generation electronics.
A new report by researchers from Berkeley Lab and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory surveys utility planning practices from roughly 30 studies across the United States. The rapid growth of rooftop solar has not been distributed equally across U.S. utility territories, and the same is true for projected future growth.
Light-emitting, four-armed nanocrystals could someday form the basis of an early warning system in structural materials by revealing microscopic cracks that portend failure, thanks to recent research by scientists from Berkeley Lab.
Berkeley Lab has been awarded more than $4 million by the Department of Energy (DOE) to undertake three projects aimed at improving the energy efficiency of buildings, which account for more than 40 percent of the country’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
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