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Berkeley Lab scientists have made significant progress in developing battery cathodes using a new class of materials that provide batteries with the same if not higher energy density than conventional lithium-ion batteries but can be made of inexpensive and abundant metals. Known as DRX, which stands for disordered rocksalts with excess lithium, this novel family of materials was invented less than 10 years ago and allows cathodes to be made without nickel or cobalt.

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In a decade-long quest, scientists at Berkeley Lab, the University of Hawaii, and Florida International University uncover new clues to the origins of the universe – and land new chemistry for cleaner combustion engines

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Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have compiled the most complete library yet of lanthanide heavy metals and their potential toxicity – by exposing baker’s yeast to lanthanides. Their findings could help researchers uncover hidden pathways between lanthanide metals and disease.

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Science Snapshots from Berkeley Lab on forest soils, vaping cannabis risks, reusable PPE, hydrogen fuel generation

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The diverse collection of microbes known as protists are understudied, but their impact on ecosystems and agriculture could be huge.

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Vaccines are turning the tide of the pandemic, but there's still a risk of COVID-19 infections. Instant at-home tests would help us return to normal, but current options aren't very accurate. A new discovery could get reliable tests on the market.

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Sunlight-reflecting “cool walls” have been shown to reduce energy costs by lowering heat gain in buildings. But they do more – reflective walls can also cool cities, fighting the urban heat island effect. The concept has new support from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which has issued a pilot credit for the installation of cool exterior walls in new homes, schools, and commercial buildings to mitigate urban heat islands.

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A five-year quest to map the universe and unravel the mysteries of “dark energy” is beginning officially today, May 17, at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. To complete its quest, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will capture and study the light from tens of millions of galaxies and other distant objects in the universe.

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Cosmologists have found a way to double the accuracy of measuring distances to supernova explosions – one of their tried-and-true tools for studying the mysterious dark energy that is making the universe expand faster and faster.

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Science Snapshots From Berkeley Lab – Water purification, infant-warming device, cuff-based heart disease monitor, ancient magnetic fields

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Plastics are ubiquitous, but they're not practical. Less than 10% are recycled, and the other ~8 billion tons are creating a pollution crisis. A Berkeley Lab team is determined to change that. A new analysis shows producing and recycling their game-changing new plastic could be easy and cheap enough to leave old plastics in the dust.

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A Q&A with Berkeley Lab researcher Hanna Breunig on techno-economic analysis, and how she uses it to make negative emissions technologies more competitive

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A new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane – a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat – varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.

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Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have designed an enzyme-activated compostable plastic that could diminish microplastics pollution. Household tap water or soil composts break the hybrid plastic material down to reusable small molecules, called monomers, in just a few days or weeks.

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Technology and commercial advancements are expected to continue to drive down the cost of wind energy, according to a survey led by Berkeley Lab of the world’s foremost wind power experts. Experts anticipate cost reductions of 17%-35% by 2035 and 37%-49% by 2050, driven by bigger and more efficient turbines, lower capital and operating costs, and other advancements.

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Reliance on petroleum fuels and raging wildfires: Two separate, large-scale challenges that could be addressed by one scientific breakthrough. Researchers from two national laboratories have collaborated to develop a streamlined and efficient process for converting woody plant matter like forest overgrowth and agricultural waste – material that is currently burned either intentionally or unintentionally – into liquid biofuel.

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A research team co-led by Berkeley Lab has created and observed quasiparticles called 3D hopfions at the nanoscale (billionths of a meter) in a magnetic system. The discovery could advance high-density, high-speed, low-power, yet ultrastable magnetic memory “spintronics” devices.

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Scientists at Berkeley have uncovered an extraordinary self-improving property that transforms an ordinary semiconductor into a highly efficient and stable artificial photosynthesis device

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Science Snapshots from Berkeley Lab: X-rays accelerate battery R&D; infrared microscopy goes off grid; substrates support 2D tech

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India’s Ambitious Clean Energy Goals, a Secret Pathway to Harnessing the Sun for Clean Energy, and a Supersmart Gas Sensor for Asthmatics

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A Q&A with Berkeley Lab scientist Eric Sundstrom on a technology to turn electrons to bioproducts

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At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, scientists recruited a world-leading microscope to capture atomic-resolution, high-speed images of gold atoms self-organizing, falling apart, and then reorganizing many times before settling into a stable, ordered crystal.

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Scientists at Berkeley Lab have demonstrated how to image samples of heavy elements as small as a single nanogram. The new approach will help scientists advance new technologies for medical imaging and cancer therapies.

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Researchers have channeled the universe’s earliest light – a relic of the universe’s formation known as the cosmic microwave background – to solve a missing-matter mystery and learn new things about galaxy formation. Their work could also help us to better understand dark energy and test Einstein’s theory of general relativity by providing new details about the rate at which galaxies are moving toward us or away from us.

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Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Los Angeles published a new study that makes the case for prioritizing public policy to help move long-haul trucking from diesel to electric. Doing so will mean huge gains in addressing the climate crisis and avoiding premature deaths due to local vehicular pollution, which disproportionately affects communities of color.

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The events following the Fukushima disaster, a decade ago, drew upon Berkeley Lab’s long-standing expertise in radiation measurements and safety, and led to the creation of long-term radiation-monitoring programs, both locally and in Japan, as well as a series of radiation surveys and technology demonstrations including drone- and helicopter-based surveys, and vehicle-based and hand-carried measurements.

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March Science Snapshots from Berkeley Lab

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COSMIC, a multipurpose X-ray instrument at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, has made headway in the scientific community since its launch less than 2 years ago, with groundbreaking contributions in fields ranging from batteries to biominerals.

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Physicists have been studying the question of how supernova explosions occur for more than 60 years. Thanks to the increasing power of supercomputing resources such as those at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, they’re moving ever closer to an answer.

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Berkeley Lab scientists have captured real-time, high-resolution videos of liquid structures taking shape as nanoparticles form a solid-like layer at the interface between oil and water. Their findings could help advance all-liquid robotics for targeted cancer drug delivery and other applications.

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Increasingly, scientists are recognizing that negative emissions technologies (NETs) to remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be an essential component in the strategy to mitigate climate change. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a multidisciplinary Department of Energy research lab, is pursuing a portfolio of negative emissions technologies and related research.

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Berkeley Lab researchers participated in a study that used machine learning to scan for new particles in three years of particle-collision data from CERN’s ATLAS detector.

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A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) used a quantum computer to successfully simulate an aspect of particle collisions that is typically neglected in high-energy physics experiments, such as those that occur at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

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Finding a way to end the coronavirus pandemic has required a global response from thousands of people across scientific, medical, academic, and political entities. Among them are scientists working at NERSC and SLAC's LCLS, who teamed up to capture images of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and leverage the superfacility model for real-time data analysis.

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Since element 99 – einsteinium – was discovered in 1952 at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb, scientists have performed very few experiments with it because it is so hard to create and is exceptionally radioactive. A team of Berkeley Lab chemists has overcome these obstacles to report the first study characterizing some of its properties, opening the door to a better understanding of the remaining transuranic elements of the actinide series.

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These news briefs cover topics including gut microbes, tsetse flies in 3D, an energy use framework for heating and cooling, and new gravitational lensing candidates.

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In Nature, a multi-institutional team including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers has produced a high-quality reference sequence of the complex switchgrass genome. Building off this work, bioenergy researchers are exploring targeted genome editing techniques to customize the crop.

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Reaching zero net emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry by 2050 can be accomplished by rebuilding U.S. energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewable energy, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day, according to new research published by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of San Francisco (USF), and the consulting firm Evolved Energy Research.

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A new, compact system has been successfully demonstrated at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center to provide simultaneous high-resolution measurements of multiple electron-beam properties.

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A test developed by Berkeley Lab scientists can quickly and easily detect whether sperm cells are carrying chromosomal defects, an advance that will help men who have undergone cancer treatment father healthy children.

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A new study, led by a theoretical physicist at Berkeley Lab, suggests that never-before-observed particles called axions may be the source of unexplained, high-energy X-ray emissions surrounding a group of neutron stars.

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January Snapshots: CO2 removal, water-splitting, battery mystery, thirdhand smoke remediation

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Before DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, can begin its 5-year mission from an Arizona mountaintop to produce the largest 3D sky map yet, researchers first needed an even bigger 2D map of the universe.

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A team of researchers co-led by Berkeley Lab and Columbia University has developed a new material called avalanching nanoparticles that, when used as a microscopic probe, offers a simpler approach to taking high-resolution, real-time snapshots of a cell’s inner workings at the nanoscale.

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The Department of Energy has announced that Susannah Tringe and Dan Kasen, two scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will receive the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of DOE’s highest honors. Additionally, former Berkeley Lab scientist M. Zahid Hasan was also named as one of the eight recipients.

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A team of biologists who banded together to support COVID-19 science determined the atomic structure of a coronavirus protein thought to help the pathogen evade and dampen response from human immune cells. The structural map has laid the groundwork for new antiviral treatments and enabled further investigations into how the newly emerged virus ravages the human body.

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Barbara have developed a science-based analytic framework to evaluate the complex connections between water and energy, and options for adaptations in response to an evolving climate.

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The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has named Rachel Slaybaugh, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, to lead Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road Division.