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Technology advancements are expected to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy, according to a survey of the world’s foremost wind power experts led by Berkeley Lab. Experts anticipate cost reductions of 24%–30% by 2030 and 35%–41% by 2050, under a median or ‘best guess’ scenario, driven by bigger and more efficient turbines, lower capital and operating costs, and other advancements

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To resolve open questions about water transport in plants and how they respond to stress such as drought, science teams from around the world gathered at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley for an intensive round of experiments.

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The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) have accepted 10 projects for their joint “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) initiative. The accepted proposals will begin on October 1, 2016.

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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will lead or play key roles in developing 11 critical research applications for next-generation supercomputers as part of DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

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Specific adaptations in the transcriptome of the most common ectomycorrhizal fungus could help their hosts be more resistant to drought stress, a finding that could be useful in developing more plant feedstocks for bioenergy amidst the changing climate.

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Catherine "Reba" Siero, an accelerator operator at Berkeley Lab, has worked for more than two decades at its 88-Inch Cyclotron and earlier worked in particle-beam-based cancer treatments and biology research at the lab.

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Berkeley Lab researchers linked the overexpression of 14 genes related to cell division to cancer patients' prognosis and response to specific treatments. The findings could be used to develop a biomarker that doctors and patients use to make better informed decisions in clinical settings.

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Scientists can now directly probe a previously hard-to-see layer of chemistry thanks to a unique X-ray toolkit developed at Berkeley Lab.

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Eight small businesses have been awarded vouchers to work with the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to bring their next-generation clean energy technologies to the marketplace faster.

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Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers have developed nanoscale display cases that enables new atomic-scale views of hard-to-study chemical and biological samples.

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Plumbing the Earth’s microbial diversity requires learning more about poorly-studied relationships between microbes and the viruses that infect them, impacting how they regulate global cycles. Using the world’s largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets, DOE JGI researchers uncovered over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes.

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Wind energy pricing remains attractive to utility and commercial purchasers, according to an annual report released by the U.S. Department of Energy and prepared by the Electricity Markets & Policy Group at Berkeley Lab. Prices offered by newly built wind projects are averaging around 2¢/kWh, driven lower by technology advancements and cost reductions.

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So far industry has only harnessed a fraction of the yeast diversity available for biotechnological applications, including biofuel production. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers aims to help boost the use of a wider range of yeasts.

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A 3-D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of millions of galaxies and explore the nature of dark energy has received approval to move forward with construction.

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An X-ray microscopy technique recently developed at Berkeley Lab has given scientists the ability to image nanoscale changes inside lithium-ion battery particles as they charge and discharge. The real-time images provide a new way to learn how batteries work, and how to improve them.

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While previous studies have found that electronic cigarettes emit toxic compounds, a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has pinpointed the source of these emissions and shown how factors such as the temperature, type, and age of the device play a role in emission levels, information that could be valuable to both manufacturers and regulators seeking to minimize the health impacts of these increasingly popular devices.

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JBEI scientists have shown that adding carbon dioxide gas during the deconstruction phase of biofuel production successfully neutralized the toxicity of ionic liquids. The technique, which is reversible, allows the liquid to be recycled, representing a major step forward in streamlining the biofuel production process.

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The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates beneath a mile of rock at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has completed its search for the missing matter of the universe. Today LUX scientific collaborators, which includes Berkeley Lab, presented the results from the detector’s final 20-month run.

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Many households in impoverished regions around the world are starting to shift away from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting—such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns—to solar-LED systems. While this trend has tremendous environmental benefits, a new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that it spurs economic development as well, to the tune of 2 million potential new jobs.

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Fungal secretomes, those collections of all molecules secreted by a cell, contain enzymes that could help cost-effectively convert plant mass into sustainable transportation fuels. In a July 19, 2016 study in Plos ONE, a comparative analysis of four fungal secretomes revealed more about the variety of pathways employed to break down carbon compounds.

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The Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet, and the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) at the University of Oregon are teaming up to create an extensive video training library to help organizations improve the performance of their networks by deploying the perfSONAR network measurement tools and the Science DMZ network architecture.

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A team of hundreds of physicists and astronomers, including those from Berkeley Lab, have announced results from the largest-ever, three-dimensional map of distant galaxies. The team constructed this map to make one of the most precise measurements yet of the dark energy currently driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

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In an advance that helps pave the way for next-generation electronics and computing technologies—and possibly paper-thin gadgets—scientists with Berkeley Lab developed a way to chemically assemble transistors and circuits that are only a few atoms thick.

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Berkeley Lab scientists at DOE's Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis have found a way to better predict how thin-film semiconductors weather the harsh conditions in systems that convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into fuel.

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Scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have discovered a possible secret to dramatically boosting the efficiency of perovskite solar cells hidden in the nanoscale peaks and valleys of the crystalline material.

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Caltech and DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers used a recently refined technique to identify both individual active cells, and single clusters of active bacteria and archaea within microbial communities. The DOE is interested in learning how the planet’s microbial dark matter can be harnessed for energy and environmental challenges.

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As the number of data centers continues to increase in the United States, the good news is that they are becoming much more energy efficient. A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that electricity consumption by data centers nationwide, after rising rapidly for more than a decade, started to plateau in 2010 and has remained steady since, at just under 2 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption.

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For the past year, staff at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have been preparing users of 20 leading science applications for the arrival of the second phase of its newest supercomputer, Cori, which consists of more than 9,300 nodes containing Intel’s Xeon Phi Knights Landing processor – which was officially unveiled June 20 at the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany. The first compute cabinets are scheduled to arrive in July.

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Berkeley Lab chemists have successfully married chemistry and biology to create reactions never before possible. They did this by replacing the iron normally found in the muscle protein myoglobin with iridium, a noble metal not known to be used by living systems.

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A prototype system that will test a planned array of 5,000 robots for a sky-mapping instrument is taking shape at Berkeley Lab. Dubbed ProtoDESI, the scaled-down, 10-robot system will run through a series of tests on a telescope in Arizona from August-September.

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Researchers are investigating a new material that might help in nuclear fuel recycling and waste reduction by capturing certain gases released during reprocessing. Conventional technologies to remove these radioactive gases operate at extremely low, energy-intensive temperatures. By working at ambient temperature, the new material has the potential to save energy, make reprocessing cleaner and less expensive. The reclaimed materials can also be reused commercially.

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A new mathematical framework developed at Berkeley Lab, published in the June 10 issue of Science Advances, allows researchers to capture fluid dynamics coupled to interface motion at unprecedented detail. The framework, called "interfacial gauge methods", developed by Robert Saye, a Luis W. Alvarez Fellow in the Mathematics Group at Berkeley Lab, rewrites the equations governing incompressible fluid flow in a way that is more amenable to accurate computer modeling.

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The Materials Project, a Google-like database of material properties aimed at accelerating innovation, has released an enormous trove of data to the public, giving scientists working on batteries, fuel cells, photovoltaics, thermoelectrics, and a host of other advanced materials a powerful tool to explore new research avenues.

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Researchers at Berkeley Lab are developing and testing materials for a new device that can be inserted via a tiny tube into a vein and soak up cancer-fighting drugs after they deliver a dose to tumors—and before they can widely circulate in the body.

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A new study led by a Berkeley Lab scientist and UC Berkeley professor establishes for the first time copper’s role in fat metabolism, further burnishing the metal’s reputation as an essential nutrient for human physiology.

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Sensory perception lies at the heart of adaptation to changing conditions, and helps fungi to improve growth and recycle organic waste, and to know when and how to infect a plant or animal host. New results from a comparative fungal genome analysis conducted by a DOE JGI-led team shed light on the evolution of sensory perception in fungi.

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DoseNet, a radiation-monitoring outreach project supported by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, has a broad aim to inform and connect students and communities using science and data.

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Massive amounts of data require infrastructure to manage and store the information in a manner than can be easily accessed for use. In a paper published May 16, 2016 in Trends in Microbiology, DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers call for the formation of a National Microbiome Data Center to efficiently manage the datasets accumulated globally.

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Billions of gallons of water are used each day in the United States for energy production—for hydroelectric power generation, thermoelectric plant cooling, and countless other industrial processes, including oil and gas mining. And huge amounts of energy are required to pump, treat, heat, and deliver water. This interdependence of water and energy is the focus of a major new research effort at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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Two years ago, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers developed OpenMSI—the most advanced computational tool for analyzing and visualizing mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) data. Now, OpenMSI has been licensed to support ImaBiotech’s Multimaging™ technology in the field of pharmaceutical and cosmetic research and development.

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Solar power could deliver $400 billion in environmental and public health benefits throughout the United States by 2050, according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab and National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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The initiative will advance the understanding of microbiome behavior and enable the protection of healthy microbiomes, which are communities of microorganisms that live on and in people, plants, soil, oceans, and the atmosphere. Microbiomes maintain the healthy function of diverse ecosystems, and they influence human health, climate change, and food security.

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A new astronomy facility, the Simons Observatory, is planned in Chile’s Atacama Desert to boost ongoing studies of the evolution of the universe, from its earliest moments to today. The observatory will probe the subtle properties of the universe’s first light, known as cosmic microwave background radiation.

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Researchers found how substantial linear defects in a new semiconductor create entirely new properties. Some of these properties indicate the defects might even mediate superconducting states.

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Scientists have devised a way to build a “quantum metamaterial”—an engineered material with exotic properties not found in nature—using ultracold atoms trapped in an artificial crystal composed of light. The theoretical work represents a step toward manipulating atoms to transmit information, perform complex simulations or function as powerful sensors.

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Berkeley Lab scientists have engineered a strain of bacteria that enables a “one-pot” method for producing advanced biofuels from a slurry of pre-treated plant material. The achievement, described in a study to be published May 10 in Green Chemistry, is a critical step in making biofuels a viable competitor to fossil fuels.

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Berkeley Lab scientists thousands of collaborators worldwide who will be sifting through loads of new data expected from this latest experimental run at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which could reveal unexpected twists in the makeup of matter and shed more light on the known pantheon of particles including the Higgs boson.

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In 2012, the United States experienced the warmest spring on record followed by the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl. A team of scientists used a network of Ameriflux sites to map the carbon flux across the United States during the drought.

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The leading method for creating quantum bits, or qubits, currently involves exploiting the structural defects in diamonds. But using NERSC resources, University of Chicago researchers found that the same defect could be engineered in cheaper aluminum nitride. If confirmed by experiments, this could significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing quantum technologies.

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A unique rapid-fire electron source—originally built as a prototype for driving next-generation X-ray lasers—will help scientists at Berkeley Lab study ultrafast chemical processes and changes in materials at the atomic scale.