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New 'cool roof time machine' will accelerate cool roof deployment

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A collaboration led by Berkeley Lab scientists has established a method to simulate in the lab the soiling and weathering of roofing materials, reproducing in only a few days the solar reflectance of roofing products naturally aged for three years. Now this protocol has been approved by American Society for Testing and Materials International as a standard practice for the industry.

Journal: Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells
Funder: US Deptartment of Energy

Researchers create a new map of invisible dark matter

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, including researchers from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world's most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail, and will improve our understanding of dark matter's role in the formation of galaxies.

On the road to spin-orbitronics

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered a new way of manipulating the magnetic domain walls in ultrathin magnets that could one day revolutionize the electronics industry through a technology called 'spin-orbitronics.'

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

First endowed professorship to link SLAC and Stanford honors Arthur Bienenstock

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have established the first endowed professorship that is reserved specifically for joint appointments between the two.

Accelerating materials discovery with world's largest database of elastic properties

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have published the world's largest set of data on the complete elastic properties of inorganic compounds, increasing by an order of magnitude the number of compounds for which such data exists.

Journal: Scientific Data
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Scientists track ultrafast creation of a catalyst with X-ray laser

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

An international team has for the first time precisely tracked the surprisingly rapid process by which light rearranges the outermost electrons of a metal compound and turns it into an active catalyst -- a substance that promotes chemical reactions.

New research project to study how tropical forests worldwide respond to climate change

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Business Announcement

Tropical forests play major roles in regulating Earth's climate, but there are large uncertainties over how they'll respond over the next 100 years as the planet's climate warms. An expansive new project led by scientists from Berkeley Lab aims to bring the future of tropical forests and the climate system into much clearer focus. The project is called the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics, or NGEE-Tropics.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Longer DNA fragments reveal rare species diversity

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A challenge in metagenomics is that the more commonly used sequencing machines generate data in short lengths, while short-read assemblers may not be able to distinguish among multiple occurrences of the same or similar sequences, making it difficult to identify all the members in a microbial community. In the April 2015 issue of Genome Research, a team including DOE JGI researchers compared two ways of using next generation Illumina sequencing machines to help with this.

Journal: Genome Research
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

BigNeuron: Unlocking the secrets of the human brain

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

To find a standard 3-D neuron reconstruction algorithm, Big Neuron will sponsor a series of international hackathons and workshops where contending algorithms will be ported onto a common software platform to analyze neuronal physical structure using the same core dataset. All ported algorithms will be bench-tested at DOE's NERSC and ORNL, as well as Human Brain Project supercomputing centers.

Skin tough

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A collaboration of Berkeley Lab and UC San Diego researchers has recorded the first direct observations of the micro-scale mechanisms behind the ability of skin to resist tearing. The results could be applied to the improvement of artificial skin, or to the development of thin film polymers for flexible electronics.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: US Air Force Office of Scientific Research / Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency