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'Lasers rewired': Scientists find a new way to make nanowire lasers

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have found a simple new way to produce nanoscale wires that can serve as bright, stable and tunable lasers -- an advance toward using light to transmit data.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Lynbrook wins second straight SLAC regional Science Bowl

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

At the annual SLAC Regional DOE Science Bowl on Saturday, Lynbrook High School pulled off a repeat performance of their 2015 win, earning a return trip to the National Science Bowl, which will be held in Washington, D.C., April 28-May 2.

SLAC X-ray laser turns crystal imperfections into better images of important biomolecules

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Often the most difficult step in taking atomic-resolution images of biological molecules is getting them to form high-quality crystals needed for X-ray studies of their structure. Now researchers have shown they can get sharp images even with imperfect crystals using the world's brightest X-ray source at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Journal: Nature
Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, European Research Council, and others, Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany, Helmholtz Association, University of Hamburg, BioXFEL Science and Technology Center

Three ways to bust ghostly dark matter

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Dark matter hunters around the world pursue three approaches to look for fingerprints of ghostly WIMPs: on the Earth's surface, underground and in space. Researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will take part in a discussion of the global search for dark matter particles at this year's AAAS Annual Meeting, to be held Feb. 11-15 in Washington, D.C.

Carbon emissions affect thousands of years of climate change

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The Earth may suffer irreversible damage that could last tens of thousands of years because of the rate humans are emitting carbon into the atmosphere. In a new study in Nature Climate Change, researchers at Oregon State University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborating institutions found that the longer-term impacts of climate change go well past the 21st century.

Journal: Nature Climate Change

Graphene is strong, but is it tough?

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed the first known statistical theory for the toughness of polycrystalline graphene, which is made with chemical vapor deposition, and found that it is indeed strong, but more importantly, its toughness -- or resistance to fracture -- is quite low.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Scientists take key step toward custom-made nanoscale chemical factories

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists have for the first time reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria to give it a new function.

Journal: Journal of the American Chemical Society

New galaxy-hunting sky camera sees redder better

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Business Announcement

A newly upgraded camera that incorporates light sensors developed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is now one of the best cameras on the planet for studying outer space at red wavelengths that are too red for the human eye to see.

Coupling 2 'tabletop' laser-plasma accelerators: A step toward ultrapowerful accelerators

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In an experiment packed with scientific firsts, researchers at Berkeley Lab's BELLA Center demonstrated that a laser pulse can accelerate an electron beam and couple it to a second laser plasma accelerator, where another laser pulse accelerates the beam to higher energy -- a fundamental breakthrough in advanced accelerator science.

Journal: Nature

Tiniest particles shrink before exploding when hit with SLAC's X-ray laser

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Researchers assumed that tiny objects would instantly blow up when hit by extremely intense light from the world's most powerful X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. But to their astonishment, these nanoparticles initially shrank instead -- a finding that provides a glimpse of the unusual world of superheated nanomaterials that could eventually also help scientists further develop X-ray techniques for taking atomic images of individual molecules.