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'Brighter than a billion suns': SLAC studies featured in TEDx Talk

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Phil Manning and his colleagues have used synchrotron light for nearly a decade to help interpret the chemical signatures locked within fossilized life. Bright X-rays have allowed them to study fossilized worm burrows, recreate pigment patterns in ancient bird feathers, see how Jurassic dinosaur bones heal and image the living chemistry of 50-million year old plant fossils.

Scientists trace 'poisoning' in chemical reactions to the atomic scale

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A combination of experiments, including X-ray studies at Berkeley Lab, revealed new details about pesky deposits that can stop chemical reactions vital to fuel production and other processes.

Journal: Scientific Reports

Thinning and retreat of West Antarctic glacier began in 1940s

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New research by an international team shows that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s.

Journal: Nature

Global brain initiatives generate tsunami of neuroscience data

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New technologies are giving researchers unprecedented opportunities to explore how the brain processes, utilizes, stores and retrieves information. But, without a coherent strategy to analyze, manage and understand the data generated by these new tools, advancements in the field will be limited. Berkeley Lab researchers and their collaborators offer a plan to overcome these big data challenges.

Journal: Neuron

New tabletop technique probes outermost electrons of atoms deep inside solids

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Researchers at the Stanford PULSE Institute have invented a new way to probe the valence electrons of atoms deep inside a crystalline solid.

X-rays capture unprecedented images of photosynthesis in action

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An international team of scientists is providing new insight into the process by which plants use light to split water and create oxygen. In experiments led by Berkeley Lab scientists, ultrafast X-ray lasers were able to capture atomic-scale images of a protein complex found in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria at room temperature.

Journal: Nature
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health

Five Berkeley lab scientists named AAAS fellows

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

Five scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

New, detailed snapshots capture photosynthesis at room temperature

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New X-ray methods at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have captured the highest resolution room-temperature images of the protein complex photosystem II, which allows scientists to closely watch how water is split during photosynthesis at the temperature at which it occurs naturally.

Journal: Nature

A new understanding of metastability clears path for next-generation materials

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have published a new study that, for the first time, explicitly quantifies the thermodynamic scale of metastability for almost 30,000 known materials. This paves the way for designing and making promising next-generation materials for use in everything from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to steels.

Journal: Science Advances

3-D imaging technique maps migration of DNA-carrying material at the center of cells

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists have produced detailed 3-D visualizations that show an unexpected connectivity in the genetic material at the center of cells, providing a new understanding of a cell's evolving architecture.

Journal: Cell Reports