News By Location

A new look at climate data shows that, by the end of the century, the heaviest days of rain and snowfall across much of North America will likely release 20 to 30 percent more moisture than they do now. Much of the increased precipitation will occur in winter, potentially exacerbating flooding in regions such as the upper Midwest and the west coast. Researchers also found that heavy precipitation days historically experienced once in a century will become more frequent – as often as once every 30 or 40 years in the Pacific Northwest and southeastern United States.

The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

A team at the Advanced Quantum Testbed at Berkeley Lab (in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Yale) developed an architectural blueprint for a novel quantum processor based on fluxonium qubits, which outperform the most widely used superconducting qubits. Furthermore, they simulated two types of logic gates to validate the performance of the proposed fluxonium blueprint.

The SLAC-Stanford team pulled hydrogen directly from ocean waters. Their work could help efforts to generate low-carbon fuel for electric grids, cars, boats and other infrastructure.

About 12% of the total global energy demand comes from heating and cooling homes and businesses. A new study suggests that using underground water to maintain comfortable temperatures could reduce consumption of natural gas and electricity in this sector by 40% in the United States. The approach, called aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES), could also help prevent blackouts caused by high power demand during extreme weather events.

Researchers have designed a molecule that slows the effects of one of SARS-CoV-2's more dangerous components – an enzyme called a protease that cuts off the immune system's communications and helps the virus replicate. While much more needs to happen to develop a drug, scientists can begin to imagine what that drug could look like – thanks to new images of the molecule bound to the protease.

Scientists from Berkeley Lab contributed to landmark climate change reports published between 2018 and 2022. Their research laid the foundation for a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report urging nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

SLAC researcher Sadasivan Shankar talks about a new environmental effort starting at the lab – building a roadmap that will help researchers improve the energy efficiency of computing, from devices like cellphones to artificial intelligence.

A whole new world of antibiotics is waiting inside the viruses that infect bacteria. Our scientists are making it easier to study them.