A research team has directly measured a spiral molecular arrangement formed by liquid crystals that could help unravel its mysteries and possibly improve the performance of electronic displays.
Though cassava is easy to cultivate, it is particularly vulnerable to plant pathogens which can significantly reduce crop yields. With the help of genomics, researchers hope to apply advanced breeding strategies that can improve cassava’s resistance to diseases and improve crop yields.
State renewables portfolio standards (RPS) have contributed to more than half of all renewable electricity growth in the United States since 2000. Most state RPS requirements will continue to rise through at least 2020, if not beyond, and collectively these policies will require substantial further growth in U.S. renewable electricity supplies, according to a new report from Berkeley Lab.
As part of a unique new X-ray laser project that will produce up to 1 million ultrabright X-ray pulses per second, Berkeley Lab researchers are managing the development of a new breed of electron "gun" and chains of powerful magnetic devices that cause electrons to emit ultrabright X-rays.
Berkeley Lab scientists have taken a big step toward the practical application of “valleytronics,” which is a new type of electronics that could lead to faster and more efficient computer logic systems and data storage chips in next-generation devices. They experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, the ability to electrically generate and control valley electrons in a two-dimensional semiconductor.
In Angewandte Chemie International Ed., DOE Joint Genome Institute and Yale University researchers report that microorganisms recognize multiple codons for selenocysteine. The finding builds on studies indicating that an organism’s genetic vocabulary is not as constrained as had been long held.
To see JBEI biochemist Ee-Been Goh in the lab, figuring out how to rewire bacteria to produce biofuels, one would never guess she was once so uninterested in school that she barely made it through junior high. Goh has been lead author on two publications on methyl ketones, one of the most promising biofuels at JBEI.
Scientists have captured the first high-resolution 3-D images from individual double-helix DNA segments attached to gold nanoparticles, which could aid in the use of DNA segments for nanoscale drug-delivery systems, markers for biological research, and components for electronic devices.
Berkeley Lab scientists have discovered a family of nature-inspired polymers that, when placed in water, spontaneously assemble into hollow crystalline nanotubes. What’s more, the nanotubes can be tuned to all have the same diameter of between five and ten nanometers, depending on the length of the polymer chain.
A new Berkeley Lab study reveals that much more is happening at the microscopic level of cloud formation than previously thought. The findings could help improve the accuracy of climate change models.
Using cryo-electron microscopy, Berkeley Lab scientist Eva Nogales and her team have made a breakthrough in our understanding of how our molecular machinery finds the right DNA to copy for making proteins, showing with unprecedented detail the role of a powerhouse transcription factor known as TFIID. The study was published this week in Nature.
A new, highly permeable carbon capture membrane developed at Berkeley Lab could lead to more efficient ways of separating carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust, preventing the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
Scientists have developed a device that enables NMR spectroscopy, coupled with a powerful molecular sensor, to analyze molecular interactions in viscous solutions and fragile materials such as liquid crystals. In a first, their method allows the sensor, hyperpolarized xenon gas, to be dissolved into minute samples of substances without disrupting their molecular order.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab have developed a new materials recipe for a battery-like hydrogen fuel cell that shields the nanocrystals from oxygen, moisture and contaminants while pushing its performance forward in key areas.
Cutting-edge simulations run at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center have yielded exciting answers to long-standing questions about plasma heat loss that have previously stymied efforts to predict the performance of fusion reactors.
Today, Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road program announced the selection of its second cohort of innovators, whose projects include next generation batteries, advanced materials, biomanufacturing, and solar technologies. Cyclotron Road recruits entrepreneurial researchers and embeds them at Berkeley Lab for up to two years in a mentored technology entrepreneurship program.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have developed a new imaging technique, tested on samples of nanoscale gold and carbon, that greatly improves images of light elements using fewer electrons. The technique can reveal structural details for materials that would be invisible to some traditional methods.
It’s estimated that 10 percent of all the energy used in buildings in the U.S. can be attributed to window performance, costing building owners about $50 billion annually, yet the high cost of replacing windows or retrofitting them with an energy efficient coating is a major deterrent. Berkeley Lab researchers are seeking to address this problem with creative chemistry—a polymer heat-reflective coating that can be painted on at one-tenth the cost.
Berkeley Lab scientists have shown for the first time that an enzyme can be tweaked to reduce lignin in plants. Their technique could help lower the cost of converting biomass into carbon-neutral fuels to power your car and other sustainably developed bio-products.
After a massive upgrade, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is smashing particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV)—nearly twice the energy of its previous run. In just 1 second, it can now produce up to 1 billion collisions and up to 10 gigabytes of data. To deal with the data deluge, ATLAS experiment researchers rely on software developed mainly at Berkeley Lab.
In the February 18, 2016 issue of Science, researchers from UCSB and including a DOE JGI team report that anaerobic gut fungi perform as well as the best fungi engineered by industry in their ability to convert plant material into sugars that are easily transformed into fuel and other products.
Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientists will play a role in a new NASA space telescope project exploring dark energy, alien worlds and the evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the universe.
In what may provide a potential path to processing information in a quantum computer, researchers have switched an intrinsic property of electrons from an excited state to a relaxed state on demand using a device that served as a microwave “tuning fork."
An international team that includes researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has captured the most precise—and puzzling—energy measurements yet of ghostly particles called reactor antineutrinos produced at a nuclear power complex in China.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have found a simple new way to produce nanoscale wires that can serve as bright, stable and tunable lasers--an advance toward using light to transmit data.
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed the first known statistical theory for the toughness of polycrystalline graphene, which is made with chemical vapor deposition, and found that it is indeed strong, but more importantly, its toughness—or resistance to fracture—is quite low.
Scientists have for the first time reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria. The new design provides an entirely new functionality that greatly expands the potential for these compartments to serve as custom-made chemical factories.
A newly upgraded camera that incorporates light sensors developed at Berkeley Lab is now one of the best cameras on the planet for studying outer space at red wavelengths that are too red for the human eye to see.
In an experiment packed with scientific firsts, researchers at Berkeley Lab's BELLA Center demonstrated that a laser pulse can accelerate an electron beam and couple it to a second laser plasma accelerator, where another laser pulse accelerates the beam to higher energy.
A protein called XPG plays a previously unknown and critical role helping to maintain genome stability in human cells. It may also help prevent breast, ovarian, and other cancers associated with defective BRCA genes.
Coastal seagrass ecosystems cover some 200,000 square kilometers and account for an estimated 15 percent of carbon fixed in global ocean. In Nature, a team including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers describes the first marine angiosperm genome: the eelgrass Zostera marina.
An international research team has simplified the steps to create highly efficient silicon solar cells by applying a new mix of materials to a standard design. Arrays of solar cells are used in solar panels to convert sunlight to electricity. The special blend of materials eliminates the need for a process known as doping that steers the device’s properties by introducing foreign atoms to its electrical contacts.
Published January 27, 2016 in Nature Communications, a team led by researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, utilized the largest collection of metagenomic datasets to uncover a completely novel bacterial phylum – “Kryptonia.”
Berkeley Lab researchers will receive $2.4 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop compact free electron lasers that will serve as powerful, affordable x-ray sources for scientific discovery. This new technology could lead to portable and high-contrast x-ray imaging to observe chemical reactions, visualize the flow of electrons, or watch biological processes unfold.
Scientists have released an "expansion pack" for a virtual tour of the universe that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own computer.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research develop and apply new method to determine whether specific climate impacts can be traced to human-caused emissions.
Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz announced awards today as part of two new additions to DOE’s ongoing Grid Modernization Initiative. Berkeley Lab will lead two projects and partner in several more. In total, the Secretary announced up to $220 million for 88 new projects across 14 National Laboratories to deliver new grid concepts, tools and technologies to support the nation’s effort to modernize the power grid.
Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide, or NMC, is one of the most promising chemistries for better lithium batteries, especially for electric vehicle applications, but scientists have been struggling to get higher capacity out of them. Now researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found that using a different method to make the material can offer substantial improvements.
A team of researchers led by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has identified several mechanisms that make a new, cold-loving material one of the toughest metallic alloys ever.
A new study estimates that billions in dollars in benefits come from reduced greenhouse gas emissions and from reductions in other air pollution for state renewable portfolio standard (RPS) policies operating in 2013. RPS policies require utilities or other electricity providers to meet a minimum portion of their load with eligible forms of renewable electricity.
Scientists have for the first time viewed how bacterial proteins self-assemble into thin sheets and begin to form the walls of the outer shell for nano-sized polyhedral compartments that function as specialized factories. The new insight may aid scientists who seek to tap this natural origami by designing novel compartments or using them as scaffolding for new types of nanoscale architectures, such as drug-delivery systems.
Understanding and manipulating plasmons is important for their potential use in photovoltaics, solar cell water splitting, and sunlight-induced fuel production from CO2. Now, for the first time, the interplay between the plasmon mode and the single particle excitation within a small metal cluster has been simulated directly. Researchers with Berkeley Lab used a real-time numerical algorithm to study both the plasmon and hot carrier within the same framework. That is critical for understanding how long a particle stays excited, and whether there is energy backflow from hot carrier to plasmon.
The Large Underground Xenon dark matter experiment, which operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has already proven itself to be the most sensitive detector in the hunt for dark matter, the unseen stuff believed to account for most of the matter in the universe. Now, a new set of calibration techniques employed by LUX scientists has again dramatically improved the detector’s sensitivity.
. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers Nitash Balsara and Hany Eitouni were developing an electroresponsive polymer that turned out to be not such a good artificial muscle, their original goal, but an excellent basis for a battery electrolyte—so good, in fact, that it was recently acquired by a major multinational company.
The electric industry in the U.S. is undergoing significant changes for a number of reasons, including new and improved technologies, changing customer desires, low load growth in many regions, and changes in federal and state policies and regulations. A new series of reports will advance the discussion by examining issues related to electric industry regulation and utility business models.
A new center for advancing computational science and networking at research institutions and universities across the country opened today at Berkeley Lab. Named Wang Hall, the facility will house the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), one of the world’s leading supercomputing centers for open science, and will be the center of operations for DOE’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), the fastest network dedicated to science.
Photovoltaics added value to homes in six markets, according to a new report led by a Berkeley Lab researcher and a home appraisal expert. Seven appraisers from across six states determined the value that PV systems added to single-family homes.
A new study by Berkeley Lab scientists has identified genetic factors that influence motor performance and body weight in a genetically diverse group of mice. The researchers also found the genes identified in the mice overlap significantly with genes related to neurological disorders and obesity in people.
The Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have built a 400 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) super-channel, the first-ever 400G production link to be deployed by a national research and education network.
Berkeley Lab scientists have uncovered new clues to how a molecular machine inside the cell acts as a gatekeeper, allowing some molecules to enter and exit the nucleus while keeping other molecules out.
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