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New research points to a flexible, cost-effective option for backup power when trouble strikes: batteries aboard trains. A study from Berkeley Lab finds that rail-based mobile energy storage is a feasible way to ensure reliability during exceptional events.

In this Q&A, Berkeley Lab's Yuxin Wu discusses how scientists are developing sensing technologies that could be installed on floating offshore structures. This would allow the structures to self-monitor damaging conditions that could lead to costly repairs, and could also gauge impacts to marine mammals.

Berkeley Lab scientists have visualized the distortions of chemical bonds in a methane molecule after it absorbs light, loses an electron, and then relaxes. Their study provides insights into how molecules react to light, which can help develop new methods to control chemical reactions.

A research team led by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley has engineered bacteria to produce new-to-nature carbon products that could provide a powerful route to sustainable biochemicals. The advance could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing of fuels, drugs, and chemicals.

Photosynthesis plays a crucial role in shaping and sustaining life on Earth, yet many aspects of the process remain a mystery. One such mystery is how Photosystem II, a protein complex in plants, algae and cyanobacteria, harvests energy from sunlight and uses it to split water, producing the oxygen we breathe. Now researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, together with collaborators from Uppsala University and Humboldt University and other institutions have succeeded in cracking a key secret of Photosystem II.

Whenever SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s linear accelerator is on, packs of around a billion electrons each travel together at nearly the speed of light through metal piping. These electron bunches form the accelerator’s particle beam, which is used to study the atomic behavior of molecules, novel materials and many other subjects. But trying to estimate what a particle beam actually looks like as it travels through an accelerator is difficult, leaving scientists often with only a rough approximation of how a beam will behave during an experiment. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC, the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have developed an algorithm that more precisely predicts a beam’s distribution of particle positions and velocities as it zips through an accelerator.

Researchers are helping women entrepreneurs in Uganda grow small businesses by investing in energy-efficient technology. Helping the women invest in energy-efficient equipment and appliances could not only benefit the women and their communities but could also reduce their business’s carbon footprint.

To accelerate development of useful new materials, researchers at Berkeley Lab are building a new kind of automated lab that uses robots guided by artificial intelligence. A-Lab will rapidly test whether materials that have been computationally predicted can be made in reality. The lab’s vision is to use AI to discover materials of the future, starting with a focus on materials for batteries and energy storage.