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The Donnan electric potential arises from an imbalance of charges at the interface of a charged membrane and a liquid, and for more than a century it has stubbornly eluded direct measurement. Many researchers have even written off such a measurement as impossible. But that era, at last, has ended. With a tool that’s conventionally used to probe the chemical composition of materials, scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) recently led the first direct measurement of the Donnan potential.

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Scientists have measured the highest toughness ever recorded, of any material, while investigating a metallic alloy made of chromium, cobalt, and nickel. Not only is the metal exceptionally strong and ductile, its properties become enhanced as it gets colder. This runs counter to most other materials in existence.

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CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technology, is poised to have a profound impact on the fields of microbiology and medicine yet again. A team led by CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield has developed a tool to edit the genomes of bacteria-infecting viruses called bacteriophages using a rare form of CRISPR. The ability to easily engineer custom-designed phages will help researchers treat dangerous drug-resistant infections and control microbiomes without antibiotics or harsh chemicals.

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Things are looking brighter than ever at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center. A recently completed upgrade will expand the center’s capabilities into new areas, including studies of particle acceleration, extremely hot plasmas, cancer treatment techniques, and materials for quantum science.

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By 2033, more than 1 billion laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices could be entering the U.S. waste stream each year. However, with better end-of-life management, new Berkeley Lab research shows electronic waste could also represent a source of valuable metals, namely gold, that could benefit the future economy by offsetting increasing demand for virgin mining.

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Berkeley Lab scientists have demonstrated a new technique, modeled after a metabolic process found in some bacteria, to convert carbon dioxide into solar fuels through artificial photosynthesis.

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Researchers say that the Chilean Andes could face marked snow loss and roughly 10% less mountain water runoff with a global warming of approximately 2.5 degrees Celsius over the next 30 years. The study has implications for the California Sierra Nevada and highlights the need for carbon mitigation.

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Berkeley Lab's ALS has received federal approval to begin construction on an upgrade that will boost the brightness of its X-ray beams at least a hundredfold. Scientists will use the improved beams for research into new materials, chemical reactions, and biological processes. This construction milestone enables the lab’s biggest project in three decades to move from planning to execution.

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Diesel-fueled freight trucks play an outsized role in producing India’s total greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. While the country has promoted policies to transition to electric vehicles for public transportation buses and cars, batteries that can power such large trucks have been too heavy and expensive to make their electrification possible. A new study shows that advances in battery technology and dramatically decreased battery costs in recent years have changed that. With the right policies and incentives, battery electric trucks would be more affordable to operate than diesel, and India could become a world leader in producing electric vehicles.

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A new study led by the Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab has measured how long it takes for several kinds of exotic nuclei to decay. The paper, published today in Physical Review Letters, marks the first experimental result from the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams.

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Berkeley Lab scientists have developed new machine learning algorithms to accelerate the analysis of data collected decades ago by HERA, the world’s most powerful electron-proton collider that ran at the DESY national research center in Germany from 1992 to 2007.

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Since 2018, Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Quantum Testbed (AQT) has led several scientific breakthroughs in quantum computing across various areas. AQT also operates an open-access experimental testbed designed for deep collaboration with external users from academia, national Laboratories, and industry.

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In celebration of Hispanic Heritage - Latin American Heritage Month, 5 QSA-affiliated scientists described how they pivoted to quantum information science (QIS) and technology, and why they're excited about the opportunities for scientific discovery. Featuring Ana Maria Rey, Pablo Poggi, Sergio Cantu, Elmer Guardado Sanchez, and Diego Barberena. QSA (Quantum Systems Accelerator) is a National QIS Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Berkeley Lab leads QSA with Sandia National Laboratories as the lead partner. QSA is composed of 15 member institutions in the United States and Canada.

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In Star Trek, the Borg are a ruthless, hive-minded collective that assimilate other beings with the intent of taking over the galaxy. Here on nonfictional planet Earth, Borgs are DNA packages that could help humans fight climate change.

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Today, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) formally unveiled ESnet6, the newest generation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) high-performance network dedicated to science. The hybrid in person and virtual event was held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and live-streamed on streaming.lbl.gov.

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In June, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survived a massive wildfire, followed by rains and mudslides. After cleaning and testing the equipment, DESI collaborators successfully restarted the experiment and began imaging the night sky again on Sept. 10. The survey is creating the largest 3D map of the universe ever made to study a phenomenon called dark energy.

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Achieving scalability in quantum processors, sensors, and networks requires novel devices that are easily manipulated between two quantum states. A team led by Berkeley Lab researchers has developed a method, using a solid-state “twisted” crystalline layered material, which gives rise to tiny light-emitting points that can be switched on and off with the simple application of an external voltage. The research could lead to a new way to make quantum bits, or qubits, which encode information in quantum computers.

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science."

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Along with vaccines, masks, and testing, indoor air hygiene and building engineering controls will be key to slowing the spread of airborne, highly infectious variants of COVID-19. In a recent review in the journal Indoor Air, researchers at Berkeley Lab presented a thorough review of the state of the science for several key strategies to reduce airborne infection risk using building controls – ventilation, filtration, airflow management and disinfection by germicidal ultraviolet (UV) light.