science wire

Whirlpools on the Nanoscale Could Multiply Magnetic Memory
"We spent 15 percent of home energy on gadgets in 2009, and we're buying more gadgets all the time," says Peter Fischer of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Research Opportunities Plentiful for Next Generation Batteries
In the opening scene of the iconic movie of the 1960s, The Graduate , Benjamin Braddock, at a party to celebrate his college degree, is given one word of advice for his future: "Plastics." Were youn

Artificial Forest for Solar Water-Splitting
In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved.

Turning Up the Heat on Biofuels
The production of biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass would benefit on several levels if carried out at temperatures between 65 and 70 degrees Celsius.

Flawed Diamonds Promise Sensory Perfection
From brain to heart to stomach, the bodies of humans and animals generate weak magnetic fields that a supersensitive detector could use to pinpoint illnesses, trace drugs - and maybe even read minds.

Mathematics of Popping Bubbles in a Foam
Written By Robert Sanders Bubble baths and soapy dishwater, the refreshing head on a beer and the luscious froth on a cappuccino.

New Advance in Biofuel Production
Advanced biofuels - liquid fuels synthesized from the sugars in cellulosic biomass - offer a clean, green and renewable alternative to gasoline, diesel and jet fuels. Bringing the costs of producing these advanced biofuels down to competitive levels with petrofuels, however, is a major challenge.

Melvin Calvin’s Moon Dust Reappears After 44 Years
When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide.

Seven Berkeley Lab Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Awards
In the fourth year of the Early Career Research Program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, seven researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were on the list of 61 recipients announced this week.

Composite Organic/Inorganic Thermoelectric is More Than Sum of Its Parts
A team led by Berkeley Lab Materials Sciences Division's Jeffrey Urban and Rachel Segalman have discovered highly conductive polymer behavior occurring at a polymer/nanocrystal interface. The composite organic/inorganic material is a thermoelectric - a material capable of converting heat into electricity - and has a higher performance than either of its constituent materials.

New Study: As Climate Changes, Boreal Forests to Shift North and Relinquish More Carbon Than Expected
It's difficult to imagine how a degree or two of warming will affect a location. Will it rain less? What will happen to the area's vegetation? New Berkeley Lab research offers a way to envision a warmer future.

Two Berkeley Lab Researchers Elected to National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences announced the election of two Berkeley Lab researchers to this year's class of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries.

Chromatography Goes Gold: Gold Nanoparticles and Monoliths Make a Perfect Match
For identifying and measuring the chemical constituents of a sample, or for purification purposes, one of the indispensable tools of chemistry is chromatography.

Four Berkeley Lab Researchers Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Four Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have been elected to the 2013 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 to recognize

Berkeley Lab Startup Brings Fuel Cells to the Developing World
In some parts of the developing world, people may live in homes without electricity or toilets or running water but yet they own cell phones.

Artificial Photosynthesis, Bio-inspired Design
Artificial photosynthesis is a dream technology that mimics a natural leaf, converting water and carbon dioxide into fuels with sunlight.

Berkeley Lab to Offer Workplace Electric Vehicle Charging
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the nation's top battery scientists are working to achieve revolutionary advances in battery performance, electric vehicles (EVs) are not just a technology of the future.

To Build a Better Battery: Two Takes on Lithium-ion Batteries from Berkeley Lab Researchers
Lithium-ion batteries have transformed our lives. Without them, we wouldn't have laptop computers or cell phones - at least, not the long-lived, lightweight kind we're used to - and in the near future they may become more important yet.

Hidden Dangers in the Air We Breathe
For decades, no one worried much about the air quality inside people's homes unless there was secondhand smoke or radon present. Then scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) made the discovery that the aggregate health consequences of poor indoor air quality are as significant as those from all traffic accidents or infectious diseases in the United States.

Good Cats Wear Black: Black Nanoparticles Could Play Key Role in Clean Energy Photocatalysis
A unique atomic-scale engineering technique for turning low-efficiency photocatalytic "white" nanoparticles of titanium dioxide into high-efficiency "black" nanoparticles could be the key to clean energy technologies based on hydrogen. Samuel Mao, a scientist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the University of California at Berkeley, leads the development of a technique for engineering disorder into the nanocrystalline structure of the semiconductor titanium dioxide.

Sweet Success
Catalysis may initiate almost all modern industrial manufacturing processes, but catalytic activity on solid surfaces is poorly understood. This is especially true for the cellulase enzymes used to release fermentable sugars from cellulosic biomass for the production of advanced biofuels. Now, researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) through support from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) have literally shed new light on cellulase  catalysis.

Department of Energy Renews Joint BioEnergy Institute for Another Five Years
Reaffirming the Obama administration's commitment to the development of sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel energy, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a five-year renewal of

Researchers Release Guide to Financing Energy Upgrade for K-12 School Districts
Energy costs K-12 schools in the U.S. $6 billion dollars annually.

Swords to Plowshares: Engineering Plants for More Biofuel Sugars
Xylan is a polysaccharide composed of pentoses - five carbon sugars - that represents a double-edged sword for advanced biofuels.

Making Do with More: Joint BioEnergy Institute Researchers Engineer Plant Cell Walls to Boost Sugar Yields for Biofuels
When blessed with a resource in overwhelming abundance it's generally a good idea to make valuable use of that resource.

Trials (and Tribulations) at Sea Can’t Keep Carbon Explorers on the Beach
Somewhere between tossing Jonah overboard and hanging that albatross around the Ancient Mariner's neck, sailors acquired a reputation for superstition.

Meeting the Computing Challenges of Next-Generation Climate Models
Remember when a megabyte (10 6 bytes) seemed like a lot of data? Then a gigabyte (10 9 ) became routine.

Computer Simulations Yield Clues to How Cells Interact With Surroundings
Your cells are social butterflies. They constantly interact with their surroundings, taking in cues on when to divide and where to anchor themselves, among other critical tasks. This networking is driven in part by proteins called integrin, which reside in a cell's outer plasma membrane. Their job is to convert mechanical forces from outside the cell into internal chemical signals that tell the cell what to do.

Planck Mission Updates the Age of the Universe and What it Contains
At a March 21 NASA telephone news conference, scientists from the U.S. team participating in the European Space Agency's Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discussed Planck's first cosmological results, including some surprising news.

Cassava brief: the problem and the genomics approach
What keeps Mtakai Ngara and Teddy Amuge up at night? Thinking about cassava. These young, ambitious, researchers working at the International Institute for Tropical Africa (IITA) just outside Nairobi, Kenya are learning more about genomics to help breed more effective cassava to feed hungry mouths in their native Africa and further afield.

Building the Massive Simulation Sets Essential to Planck Results
To make the most precise measurement yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the remnant radiation from the big bang - the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Planck satellite mission has been collecting trillions of observations of the sky since the summer of 2009.

Predictability: The Brass Ring For Synthetic Biology
Predictability is often used synonymously with "boring," as in that story or that outcome was soooo predictable . For practioners of synthetic biology seeking to engineer valuable new microbes, however, predictability is the brass ring that must be captured. Researchers with the multi-institutional partnership known as BIOFAB have become the first to grab at least a portion of this ring by unveiling a package of public domain DNA sequences and statistical models that greatly increase the reliability and precision by which biological systems can be engineered.

The Science of Clouds--Why They Matter, and Why There May be Fewer of Them
The climate models that scientists use to understand and project climate change are improving constantly, with better representations of the oceans, ice, land surfaces and other factors in the atmosphere. While there is still some degree of uncertainty in all these components, the largest source of uncertainty in today's climate models are clouds.

Surprising Control over Photoelectrons from a Topological Insulator
Plain-looking but inherently strange crystalline materials called 3D topological insulators (TIs) are all the rage in materials science. Even at room temperature, a single chunk of TI is a good insulator in the bulk, yet behaves like a metal on its surface. Researchers find TIs exciting partly because the electrons that flow swiftly across their surfaces are "spin polarized": the electron's spin is locked to its momentum, perpendicular to the direction of travel.

Long Predicted Atomic Collapse State Observed in Graphene
The first experimental observation of a quantum mechanical phenomenon that was predicted nearly 70 years ago holds important implications for the future of graphene-based electronic devices. Working with microscopic artificial atomic nuclei fabricated on graphene, a collaboration of researchers led by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have imaged the "atomic collapse" states theorized to occur around super-large atomic nuclei.

In the Blink of an Eye: X-ray Imaging on the Attosecond Timescale
In the blink of an eye, more attoseconds have expired than the age of Earth measured in - minutes. A lot more.

Do We Owe Our Sense of Smell to Epigenetics?
Olfactory sensory neurons - nerve cells in the nose - directly sense molecules that convey scent, then send the signals to the brain.

Running, Even in Excess, Doesn’t Lead to More Osteoarthritis and Hip Replacements
Need another reason to dust off those running shoes in the back of the closet? It turns out that running longer distances actually decreases a person's risk of osteoarthritis and hip replacements, according to new research conducted by Paul Williams of Berkeley Lab's Life Sciences Division.

Engineering Bacterial Live Wires
Just like electronics, living cells use electrons for energy and information transfer. Despite electrons being a common "language" of the living and electronic worlds, living cells cannot speak to our largely technological realm.

A Closer Look at Life: X-ray Microscopy Hits the Sweet Spot for Chemical and Elemental Imaging
In perhaps no other scientific field does the adage “form follows function” hold more true than in biology, especially the biology of living cells, which is why our knowledge of cells starts with imaging.

New Opportunities for Crystal Growth
Talk with material scientist Edith Bourret-Courchesne about what it takes to grow and develop useful crystals and a word you will hear repeated often is "patience." As the leader of a unique crystal

Searching for the Solar System’s Chemical Recipe
By studying the origins of different isotope ratios among the elements that make up today's smorgasbord of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and interplanetary ice and dust, Mark Thiemens and his colleagues hope to learn how our solar system evolved. Thiemens, Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, has worked on this problem for over three decades.

A Cyclotron’s Long Journey Home
Seventy-five years after one of the world's first working cyclotrons was handed to the London Science Museum, it has returned to its birthplace in the Berkeley hills, where the man who invented it, E

Black Gold: Enabling Bright, High Rep-Rate Electron Beams
Free electron lasers (FELs) have proven their worth, but next-generation light sources will have to do better than produce ultrabright x-ray pulses 100 or so times a second.

Revealing the Secrets of Motility in Archaea
The protein structure of the motor that propels archaea has been characterized for the first time by a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Germany's Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Terrestrial Microbiology. The motility structure of this third domain of life has long been called a flagellum, a whip-like filament that, like the well-studied bacterial flagellum, rotates like a propeller.

New Clue to Clinical Trial Failures of MMP Cancer Therapies
Proposed cancer therapeutic drugs based on blocking the catalytic activities of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), which profoundly remodel the environment surrounding a breast cell, have performed poorly in clinical trials. In mouse studies of MMP14, an enzyme that is often highly expressed in breast cancer, Berkeley Lab researchers have found a possible clue as to why.

New Details on the Molecular Machinery of Cancer
Researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have provided important new details into the activation of the epidermal growth fa

LUX ZEPLIN Primed to Take the Next Step Forward in the Search for Dark Matter
The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration has received a major award from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science to support a year of research and development leading to a second-generation dark-matter experiment.

The Last Big Bump Before a Supernova Explodes
The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) brings together universities, observatories, and one national laboratory to hunt for supernovae and other astronomical objects.

Blocking Infinity in a Topological Insulator
In bulk, topological insulators (TIs) are good insulators, but on their surface they act as metals, with a twist: the spin and direction of electrons moving across the surface of a TI are locked together. TIs offer unique opportunities to control electric currents and magnetism, and new research by a team of scientists from China and the U.S., working with Berkeley Lab's Alexei Fedorov at beamline 12.0 at the Advanced Light Source, points to ways to manipulate their surface states.

In the Field: Counting Trees in the Amazon Jungle
Jeff Chambers' path to the Amazon forest started 20 years ago in an unlikely place: Livermore, California.

Big Energy Savings in The New York Times Building
Designing a building holistically, and making sure that its components and systems work together according to design intent, can pay big dividends in energy savings and occupant satisfaction, accordi

Genome-wide Atlas of Gene Enhancers in the Brain On-line
Future research into the underlying causes of neurological disorders such as autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia, should greatly benefit from a first-of-its-kind atlas of gene-enhancers in the cerebrum (telencephalon).

New Computational Pipeline Analyzes Tumor Images, May Help Predict Response to Cancer Therapy
How's this for big data: A whole-slide image of a tumor section can be ten billion pixels. There can be thousands of such images in the tumor cohorts maintained by The Cancer Genome Atlas project, which are collected from a large pool of patients.

Biofuels Blend Right In
Winemakers have long known that blending different grape varietals can favorably balance the flavor characteristics of the wine they produce. In the future, makers of advanced biofuels might use a similar strategy, blending different feedstock varieties to balance the energy characteristics of the transportation fuel they produce.

The Human Side of the Energy Equation
If your utility company were to send you a letter challenging you to use less energy than your neighbors, would you respond?

Hitting the Sweet Spot for Advanced Biofuel Technologies
Earth's atmosphere and the American economy would greatly benefit from the commercial development of clean, green and renewable domestic biofuels.

Research Team Maximizes Impact of New Energy Technologies
History is rife with new inventions that initially seemed beneficial but later turned out to have unforeseen environmental consequences. Chlorofluorocarbons, for example, were viewed as miracle chemicals and used in huge amounts starting in the 1960s in a myriad of ways, from refrigeration to firefighting.

What’s the cost of a healthy home?
California's residential ventilation requirements in Title 24 (the State energy code for buildings) are designed to balance healthy home ventilation with efficient energy use, but some studies suggest that whole-house ventilation systems don't always meet their expected performance in either category.

Synchrotron Infrared Unveils a Mysterious Microbial Community
In the fall of 2010, Hoi-Ying Holman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) was approached by an international team researching a mysterious microbial community discovered deep in cold sulfur springs in southern Germany. "They told me what they were doing and said, 'We know what you contributed to the oil-spill research,'" recalls Holman, who heads the Chemical Ecology group in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division.

ESnet’s New Map Gives Up-to-the-Minute Network Data
A new interactive map developed by the Department of Energy's ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) provides a detailed, up-to-the-minute look at the level of traffic traversing the various sections of the network as it connects 40 research sites around the country.

Doubling Down on Energy Efficiency
Spending on energy efficiency programs funded by electric and natural gas utility customers will double by 2025 to about $9.5 billion per year, according to projections published today by researchers at Berkeley Lab.

New Key to Organism Complexity Identified
The enormously diverse complexity seen amongst individual species within the animal kingdom evolved from a surprisingly small gene pool. For example, mice effectively serve as medical research models because humans and mice share 80-percent of the same protein-coding genes.

One Step Closer to Hydrogen Production from Photoelectrochemical Water-Splitting
In the quest to produce an environmentally benign renewable fuel, scientists have explored many techniques to split water molecules to produce hydrogen. Still, the current photovoltaic designs are not yet technically or economically viable. Materials research in this area has been promising, but research on the engineering design of these photoelectrochemical systems has been sparse.

The Farthest Supernova Yet for Measuring Cosmic History
What if you had a "Wayback Television Set" and could watch an entire month of ancient prehistory unfold before your eyes in real time? David Rubin of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) presented just such a scenario to the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, CA, when he announced the discovery of a striking astronomical object: a Type Ia supernova with a redshift of 1.71 that dates back 10 billion years in time.

New Path to More Efficient Organic Solar Cells Uncovered at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source
Why are efficient and affordable solar cells so highly coveted? Volume. The amount of solar energy lighting up Earth's land mass every year is nearly 3,000 times the total amount of annual human energy use. But to compete with energy from fossil fuels, photovoltaic devices must convert sunlight to electricity with a certain measure of efficiency.

How do You Know if You Ran Through a Wall?
Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

How Computers Push on the Molecules They Simulate
Because modern computers have to depict the real world with digital representations of numbers instead of physical analogues, to simulate the continuous passage of time they have to digitize time into small slices. This kind of simulation is essential in disciplines from medical and biological research, to new materials, to fundamental considerations of quantum mechanics, and the fact that it inevitably introduces errors is an ongoing problem for scientists.

Can We Accurately Model Fluid Flow in Shale?
Given that over 20 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, a third of the United States' total reserves, are thought to be trapped in shale, and given the rush to exploit shale oil and gas resources by

President Obama Honors Berkeley Lab’s Art Rosenfeld as One of the Nation’s Top Technology Innovators

Boosting Galactan Sugars Could Boost Biofuel Production
Galactan is a polymer of galactose, a six-carbon sugar that can be readily fermented by yeast into ethanol and is a target of interest for researchers in advanced biofuels produced from cellulosic biomass. Now an international collaboration led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) has identified the first enzyme capable of substantially boosting the amount of galactan in plant cell walls.

Assembling the First Detector Units of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR
On Dec. 6, working nearly a mile underground in the cleanest space in South Dakota, Ryan Martin of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division (NSD) assembled the first of 70 detector units for the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR experiment. Each unit consists of a polished slice of pure germanium crystal the size of a hockey puck, attached to an electronics board on a wafer-thin disk of fused silica.

Impact of Climate Change on California’s Electricity Infrastructure Could Be Costly
If you think it's been unusually hot lately, just wait-by the end of the century, temperatures in California are expected to rise significantly.

Flexing fingers for micro-robotics: Berkeley Lab scientists create a powerful, microscale actuator
Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 2012 -Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger. Based on an oxide material that expands and contracts dramatically in response to a small temperature variation, the actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are promising for microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.

Nanocrystals Not Small Enough to Avoid Defects
Nanocrystals as protective coatings for advanced gas turbine and jet engines are receiving a lot of attention for their many advantageous mechanical properties, including their resistance to stress. However, contrary to computer simulations, the tiny size of nanocrystals apparently does not safeguard them from defects.

Insurance Industry Paying Increasing Attention to Climate Change
The insurance industry, the world's largest business with $4.6 trillion in revenues, is making larger efforts to manage climate change-related risks, according to a new study published today in the journal Science .

What Kind of Iron is in the Southern Ocean?
The Southern Ocean, circling the Earth between Antarctica and the southernmost regions of Africa, South America, and Australia, is notorious for its High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyl zones, areas otherwise rich in nutrients but poor in essential iron. Sea life is less abundant in these regions because the growth of phytoplankton, the marine plants that form the base of the food chain, is suppressed.

Phase 1 of New Edison Supercomputer Arrives at NERSC

Berkeley Lab Breaks Ground on Flexible Design Building to Test Low-energy Systems and Components
Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 7, 2012 -Today marks the start of a new era for research on energy-efficient buildings at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Six Berkeley Lab Scientists Are 2012 APS Fellows
This year's American Physical Society (APS) Fellows include six scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), four from the Accelerator a

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Gives a Big Boost to BigBOSS
A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of

Courtesy of LEGOs, ATLAS Makes the Trip From the Large Hadron Collider to Berkeley Lab
The ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, for which Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers provided crucial elements of the inner detector and other key contributions, has joined Ernest La

Innovation on the Cutting-Edge: Advancing Energy Efficiency Through Two New ARPA-E Projects at Berkeley Lab
Two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) research projects were awarded grants by the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to advance energy technologies. The two grants total nearly $5 million. The first grant of $3 million went to the Molecular Foundry's Delia Milliron for her work on smart window technologies.

Berkeley Lab Part of Energy Department Team Selected as DOE’s Batteries and Energy Storage Hub
Berkeley, Calif., Nov.

Climate Change Study Strengthens Link to Human Activities
New research shows some of the clearest evidence yet of a discernible human influence on atmospheric temperature. Published online in the Nov. 29 early edition of the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , the study compared 20 of the latest climate models against 33 years of satellite data.

Two Berkeley Lab Scientists Named AAAS Fellows
Susan Celniker of the Life Sciences Division (LSD) and Wim Leemans of the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 2012.

The Installed Price of Solar Photovoltaic Systems in the U.S. Continues to Decline at a Rapid Pace
Berkeley, CA - The installed price of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the United States fell substantially in 2011 and through the first half of 2012, according to the latest edition of Tra

Modeling the Breaking Points of Metallic Glasses
Metallic glass alloys (or liquid metals) are three times stronger than the best industrial steel, but can be molded into complex shapes with the same ease as plastic. These materials are highly resistant to scratching, denting, shattering and corrosion. So far, they have been used in a variety of products from golf clubs to aircraft components.