Using complementary microscopy and spectroscopy techniques, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) say they have solved the structure of lithium- and manganese-rich transition metal oxides, a potentially game-changing battery material and the subject of intense debate in the decade since it was discovered.
To understand and harness the capabilities of Earth’s microbial ecosystems, nearly fifty scientists from Department of Energy national laboratories, universities, and research institutions propose a national effort called the Unified Microbiome Initiative.
Berkeley Lab researchers have developed metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) that feature flexible gas-adsorbing pores, giving them a high capacity for storing methane. This capability has the potential to help make the driving range of adsorbed-natural-gas (ANG) cars comparable to that of a typical gasoline-powered car.
Scientists from Berkeley Lab have set out to help build the world’s first total-body positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, a medical imaging device that could change the way cancers and other diseases are diagnosed and treated. The project is a consortium led by a UC Davis research team and includes scientists from Berkeley Lab and the University of Pennsylvania. It’s supported by a recently announced five-year, $15.5 million Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health.
The DOE Joint Genome Institute has selected 27 new projects for the 2016 Community Science Program that, DOE JGI User Programs Deputy Susannah Tringe said, “build our portfolio in key focus areas including sustainable bioenergy production, plant microbiomes and terrestrial biogeochemistry.”
ACM and IEEE Computer Society have named Katherine Yelick as the recipient of the 2015 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for innovative research contributions to parallel computing languages that have been used in both the research community and in production environments. She was also cited for her strategic leadership of the national research laboratories and for developing novel educational and mentoring tools. The award will be presented at SC 15: the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis November 17, in Austin, Texas.
Researchers at University of New Mexico and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say cybersecurity breeches are not happening more frequently than they did a decade ago. And these data breaches in general are not growing in size.
Scientists aspire to build nanostructures that mimic the complexity and function of nature’s proteins. These microscopic widgets could be customized into incredibly sensitive chemical detectors or long-lasting catalysts. But as with any craft that requires extreme precision, researchers must first learn how to finesse the materials they’ll use to build these structures. A discovery by Berkeley Lab scientists is a big step in this direction. The scientists discovered a design rule that enables a recently created material to exist.
Researchers led by a scientist from Berkeley Lab have developed a simple model of permafrost carbon based on direct observations. Their approach could help climate scientists evaluate how well permafrost dynamics are represented in the Earth system models used to predict climate change.
Solar energy pricing is at an all-time low, according to a new report released by Berkeley Lab. Driven by lower installed costs, improved project performance, and a race to build projects ahead of a reduction in a key federal incentive, utility-scale solar project developers have been negotiating power sales agreements with utilities at prices averaging just 5¢/kWh.
Berkeley Lab researchers have produced the first atomically thin 2D sheets of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites. These ionic materials exhibit optical properties not found in 2D covalent semiconductors such as graphene, making them promising alternatives to silicon for future electronic devices.
Department of Energy has announced approval of a grant of $10.5 million over three years to expand the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA). CAMERA’s mission is to develop fundamental mathematics and algorithms, delivered as data analysis software that can accelerate scientific discovery.
Deploying a set of tools called “exometabolomics,” a Berkeley Lab team harnessed the analytical capabilities of mass spectrometry techniques to quantitatively measure how individual microbes and the biocrust community transform complex mixtures of metabolites from soil. The study published September 22, 2015 in Nature Communications.
Berkeley researchers have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.
Today, the international Daya Bay Collaboration announces new findings on the measurements of neutrinos, paving the way forward for further neutrino research, and confirming that the Daya Bay neutrino experiment continues to be one to watch.
A Berkeley Lab-based research collaboration of astrophysicists, statisticians and computer scientists has developed Celeste, a new statistical inference model designed to enhance one of modern astronomy’s most time-tested tools: sky surveys.
One of the most long-lived and active space-chip testing programs is at the Berkeley Lab. Since 1979, most American satellites and many major NASA projects including the Mars Rover Curiosity, the space shuttles, and the new Orion capsule, have had one or more electronic components go through Berkeley Lab's cyclotron.
Time-lapse imaging can make complicated processes easier to grasp. Berkeley Lab scientists are using a similar approach to study how cells repair DNA damage. Microscopy images are acquired about every thirty minutes over a span of up to two days, and the resulting sequence of images shows ever-changing hotspots inside cells where DNA is under repair.
Berkeley Lab researchers have incorporated molecules of porphyrin CO2 catalysts into the sponge-like crystals of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to create a molecular system that not only absorbs carbon dioxide, but also selectively reduces it to CO, a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products.
Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have reported a major advance in understanding the biological chemistry of radioactive metals, opening up new avenues of research into strategies for remedial action in the event of possible human exposure to nuclear contaminants.
Berkeley Lab researchers using a bioinorganic hybrid approach to artificial photosynthesis have combined semiconducting nanowires with select microbes to create a system that produces renewable molecular hydrogen and uses it to synthesize carbon dioxide into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.
In the most comprehensive analysis of electricity reliability trends in the United States, researchers at Berkeley Lab and Stanford University have found that, while, on average, the frequency of power outages has not changed in recent years, the total number of minutes customers are without power each year has been increasing over time.
Using physical chemistry methods to look at biology at the nanoscale, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher has invented a new technology to image single molecules with unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution, thus leading to the first “true-color” super-resolution microscope.
Working at the Molecular Foundry, Berkeley Lab researchers used their “Campanile” nano-optical probe to make some surprising discoveries about molybdenum disulfide, a member of the “transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) semiconductor family whose optoelectronic properties hold great promise for future nanoelectronic and photonic devices.
The installed price of distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the United States continues to fall precipitously. This is according to the latest edition of Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost tracking report produced by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Wind energy pricing is at an all-time low, according to a new report released by the U.S. Department of Energy and prepared by Berkeley Lab. The prices offered by wind projects to utility purchasers averaged under 2.5¢/kWh for projects negotiating contracts in 2014, spurring demand for wind energy.
An emerging technique called fluctuation X-ray scattering (FXS) could provide much more detail about a protein’s molecular structure than traditional solution scattering. But a major limitation for FXS has been a lack of math methods to efficiently interpret the data. That’s where Berkeley Lab’s M-TIP comes in.
Researchers walk a fine line in stressing algae just enough to produce lipids that can be converted into biofuel without killing them. In Nature Plants, a team led by U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) scientists analyzed the genes that are being activated during algal lipid production.
Imagine being able to test your food in your very own kitchen to quickly determine if it carried any deadly microbes. Research conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now being commercialized by Optokey may make that possible.
Researchers from Berkeley Lab and Columbia University have created the world’s highest-performance single-molecule diode. Development of a functional single-molecule diode is a major pursuit of the electronics industry.
JBEI, UC Davis and Berkeley Lab researchers have identified a bacterial signaling molecule that triggers an immunity response in rice plants, enabling the plants to resist a devastating blight disease.
“SINGLE” is a new imaging technique that provides the first atomic-scale 3D structures of individual nanoparticles in solution. This is an important step for improving the design of colloidal nanoparticles for catalysis and energy research applications.
In a study published online July 16, 2015 in Science Express, scientists looked at roles of three phytohormones, regulatory chemicals produced by a plant’s immune system, in controlling the composition of the root microbiome in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana.
Scientists discovered that coffee berry borers worldwide share 14 bacterial species in their digestive tracts that degrade and detoxify caffeine. They also found the most prevalent of these bacteria has a gene that helps break down caffeine. Their research sheds light on the ecology of the destructive bug and could lead to new ways to fight it.
A team from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and their collaborators developed and evaluated the MiSI method for classifying microbial species that could be supplemented – as needed – by traditional approaches relied on by microbiologists for decades.
Future distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment levels are highly sensitive to retail electricity rate design, according to a newly released report by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The study also explores the feedback effects between retail electricity rates and PV deployment, and suggests that increased solar deployment can lead to changes in PV compensation levels that either accelerate or dampen further deployment.
A WWII aircraft carrier used for atomic-bomb target practice is scuttled off the coast of California in the 1950s. Berkeley Lab researchers help scientists determine the radiation risk of exploring the sunken ship.
As it seeks to accelerate innovation leading to a breakthrough battery technology, Berkeley Lab’s battery group has made industry engagement a top priority. The mechanisms are detailed in a new website, energystorage.lbl.gov.
Imagine a fleet of driverless taxis roaming your city, ready to pick you up and take you to your destination at a moment’s notice. While this may seem fantastical, it may be only a matter of time before it becomes reality. And according to a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, such a system would both be cost-effective and greatly reduce per-mile emissions of greenhouse gases.
Berkeley Lab scientists are developing a cell culture that could help researchers better identify chemicals that increase breast cancer susceptibility. The scientists will grow the culture using adult stem cells obtained from breast tissue. Their test will show if a chemical causes a breakdown in cell-to-cell communication, which is a fundamental defect of cancer.
A study in The ISME Journal describes a tool called ProDeGe developed by U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) scientists that is the first computational protocol for quick and automated removal of contaminant sequences from draft microbial genomes.
Quantum dots promise an astounding range of applications, if scientists can conquer their annoying habit of blinking. Researchers computing at NERSC recently ran simulations that offer new insights into the problem.
Berkeley Lab scientist Sebastien Biraud and Margaret Torn are leading an aerial campaign for DOE’s Atmospheric Measurement Research (ARM) Climate Research Facility over Alaska’s North Slope to take air samples and find out why current climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is getting warmer.
There’s an urgent demand for new antimicrobial compounds that are effective against constantly emerging drug-resistant bacteria. Two robotic chemical-synthesizing machines at the Molecular Foundry have joined the search.
A team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, JGI and UC Berkeley, simplified and sped up genome assembly, reducing a months-long process to mere minutes. This was primarily achieved by “parallelizing” the code to harness the processing power of supercomputers.
The Solar Energy Research Center (SERC), renamed to Chu Hall, opened today at Berkeley Lab. It will house laboratories and offices devoted to photovoltaic and electro-chemical solar energy systems designed to improve on what plants do and make transportation fuels. The building houses the lab’s programs in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute. The three-story, nearly 40,000 square-foot, building cost $59 million will house approximately 100 researchers and was named after former Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu, who went on to become U.S. Energy Secretary.
Using a "roadmap" of theoretical calculations and supercomputer simulations performed by Berkeley Lab's Daniel Kasen, astronomers observed a flash of light caused by a supernova slamming into a nearby star, allowing them to determine the stellar system from which a Type Ia supernova was born. This finding confirms one of two competing theories about Type Ia supernovae birth.
A novel X-ray scattering concept by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Advanced Light Source (ALS) is receiving support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in the amount of $2.4M.
Berkeley Lab researchers, working at the Molecular Foundry, have invented a technique called “CLAIRE” that extends the incredible resolution of electron microscopy to the non-invasive nanoscale imaging of soft matter, including biomolecules, liquids, polymers, gels and foams.
A study sponsored by ENIGMA, a DOE “Scientific Focus Area Program” based at the Berkeley Lab has found that statistical analysis of DNA from natural microbial communities can be used to accurately identify environmental contaminants and serve as quantitative geochemical biosensors.
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