U.S. Department of Energy Research News

14-Apr-2002
DOE science grid
IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) recently announced a collaboration to begin deploying the first systems on a nationwide computing grid that will empower researchers to tackle scientific challenges beyond the capability of existing computers.

11-Mar-2002
Hand-held radiation detector could outsmart terrorists
Engineers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories have developed a 10-pound, battery-powered radiation detector called Cryo3 that is intended to outsmart anyone trying to smuggle radioactive material into the country.

28-Jan-2002
Disorderly superconductors caught in the act
The "granular" nature of superconductivity in underdoped high-temperature superconductors proposed by theorists has had some believers but many skeptics. New observations, reported in the 24 January issue of Nature, may shift how researchers think about these materials.

3-Dec-2001
Homeland security
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently took information on three projects to DOE headquarters in Washington to brief Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. They were part of an exhibition of more than two dozen counter-terrorism technologies sponsored by the DOE.

26-Nov-2001
New way to make 'neuts'
Neutrons can penetrate deeply to find defects in large machine parts or tiny microdevices, elucidate the structure of biological systems and polymers, sense fluids in geological formations, and probe solids and liquids on the atomic scale.

5-Nov-2001
A new way to visualize cells and nuclei
To learn how tissues develop and maintain their organization�and especially to learn what goes wrong when cancer strikes�it's essential to study individual cells and their nuclei within tissues. The problem is that in real tissues, and in many cell cultures grown in the laboratory, cells are often tightly clustered; their boundaries and the borders of their nuclei are hard to distinguish.

29-Oct-2001
World's largest unclassified supercomputer
Scientists at universities and national laboratories across the country are now tapping into the power of the world's largest supercomputer dedicated to unclassified research and have reported important breakthroughs in climate research, materials science and astrophysics.

29-Oct-2001
Gene-rich pufferfish DNA decoded
Although the Fugu genome contains essentially the same genes and regulatory sequences as the human genome, it carries those genes and regulatory sequences in approximately 365 million bases as compared to the 3 billion bases that make up human DNA. With far less so-called "junk DNA" to sort through, finding genes and controlling sequences in the Fugu genome should be a much easier task.

8-Oct-2001
Genetic research identifies new risk factor in heart disease
Dr. Edward Rubin, who heads the Genome Sciences Department in the Life Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and Len Pennacchio, an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Fellow working in Rubin's research group, led a study in which the new gene�named apoAV�was identified by comparing the DNA sequences of humans and mice. ApoAV's function was tested first in genetically engineered mice then in human clinical studies and shown to significantly influence triglyceride levels in both mammals.

1-Oct-2001
Gravity in large extra dimensions
n 1998, Nima Arkani-Hamed found himself pondering one of the conundrums of modern physics: why is gravity so much weaker than the other fundamental forces? Surrounded by massive objects like falling apples, orbiting moons, and our own occasionally clumsy bodies, we don't think of gravity as weak. Compared to electromagnetism, however-or the aptly named strong force that binds quarks, or even the "weak" force that governs some forms of radioactive decay-gravity is feeble.

1-Oct-2001
Travels of a young physicist
A young physicist recounts his career from the University of California at Berkeley and the laboratories of Alexander Pines, famed pioneer in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

1-Oct-2001
Tiny particles cause big stir
Emitted as the result of thermonuclear reactions in the core of the sun and supernovae, the ghostlike elementary particles called "neutrinos" usually travel unnoticed through space, in immense numbers and across vast distances. However, the discovery that these erstwhile phantoms have mass and are polymorphous generated substantial notice from the media on Earth.

1-Oct-2001
Microtools for the nanoworld
Most of what we call nanotechnology involves hundreds or thousands of atoms but in a nanometer there's enough room for three atoms. If we are going to achieve real nanotechnology, we are going to have to learn how to put atoms together one at a time.

1-Oct-2001
Beyond alchemy and the Wright brothers: Nanosecrets of everyday things
t's their nanostructure that makes many crucial materials useful, and chemical processes essential to everyday life routinely do their work on the nanoscale. There's a lot more to nanoscience than building itty-bitty widgets. Catalysts are "helper" substances that promote chemical reactions without themselves being consumed. Nature's catalysts, enzymes, assemble only specific end products. Industrial catalysts are rarely so precise.

1-Oct-2001
Dendrimers: Branching out into realms of molecular architecture
Dendrimers may well become the flagship of nanotechnology's building blocks, a class of polymerized macromolecules that have the potential to provide the most exquisitely tailored forms and functions ever realized outside of nature.

1-Oct-2001
Nanotubes: Superhard, superstrong, super useful
Not only do nanotubes offer a full range of electrical and thermal conductivity properties (they conduct heat better than any other known material), they're also about a hundred times stronger than steel and more durable than diamonds. Their potential for use in electronics is nothing short of mind-boggling: if all the nanotubes that could be packed into a one-half-inch cube were to be laid out end to end, they would stretch some 250,000 miles.

1-Oct-2001
The coming of the nano-age
The emerging field of nanotechnology promises to change the way almost everything�from vaccines to computers�is designed and made.

1-Oct-2001
Nanocrystals: The shape of things to come
Nanocrystals are particularly attractive as building blocks for larger structures because it's possible - even easy - to prepare nanocrystals that are highly perfect.

27-Aug-2001
New breast cancer gene found
To the small list of genes that play a role in the development of breast cancer can now be added the name ZNF217. Multiple copies of this gene were found to remove natural restrictions on cell growth and thereby increase the chances for malignancy in a study jointly conducted by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

26-Jul-2001
Are the digits of pi random? A Berkeley Lab researcher may hold the key
Pi, the ubiquitous number whose first few digits are 3.14159, is irrational, which means that its digits run on forever (by now they have been calculated to billions of places) and never repeat in a cyclical fashion. Numbers like pi are also thought to be "normal," which means that their digits are random in a certain statistical sense.

14-Jun-2001
New findings on breast cancer reported at the annual AAAS meeting
New experimental findings by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) cell biologist Mary Helen Barcellos-Hoff show that exposure to ionizing radiation creates a microenvironment in the tissue surrounding breast cells that can cause even nonirradiated cells and their progeny to become cancerous. The discovery suggests new and possibly more effective means for preventing breast cancer.

4-Jun-2001
MAXIMA unveils high resolution picture of the early universe
New evidence derived from measurements of minute variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have produced a new diagram of sound waves in the dense early universe. The graph, called a CMB "power spectrum," not only shows a primary resonance but is consistent with two more harmonics, or peaks.

4-Jun-2001
Atomic scale tinker toys
Nanotechnology offers a potential cornucopia of benefits, from palm-sized supercomputers to synthesized antibodies to molecular-scale robots. Such wonders will be constructed from the ground up using nano-sized building blocks.

1-Apr-2001
The oldest, farthest type Ia supernova was a lucky catch
Berkeley Lab astrophysicist Peter Nugent, working with Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute, used an IBM SP supercomputer at NERSC to analyze data from an exploding star that had been caught once on purpose and twice by accident by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.