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Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry have discovered surprising new rules for creating ultra-bright light-emitting crystals that are less than 10 nanometers in diameter. These ultra-tiny but ultra-bright nanoprobes should be a big asset for biological imaging, especially deep-tissue optical imaging of neurons in the brain.

Researchers from Michigan State University, the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have published the largest soil DNA sequencing effort to date in PNAS. What has emerged in this first of the studies to come from this project is a simple, elegant solution to sifting through the deluge of information gleaned, as well as a sobering reality check on just how hard a challenge these environments will be.

A JCAP study shows that nearly 90 percent of the electrons generated by a semiconductor/cobaloxime hybrid catalyst designed to store solar energy in hydrogen are being stored in their intended target molecules.

Scientists believed that Type Ia supernovae, the best cosmological standard candles, are similar in brightness because they suffer thermonuclear explosions when the white dwarf stars that are their progenitors reach 1.4 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar mass. Now the Nearby Supernova Factory based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has shown that white dwarfs exploding as Type Ia supernovae have a range of masses. Their light-curve widths are directly proportional to the mass involved in the explosion.

The first direct, temporally resolved observations of intermediate steps in water oxidation using cobalt oxide, an Earth-abundant solid catalyst, revealed kinetic bottlenecks whose elimination would help boost the efficiency of artificial photosynthesis systems.

Researchers at Berkeley and Argonne National Labs have discovered a highly promising new class of nanocatalysts for fuel cells and water-alkali electrolyzers that are an order of magnitude higher in activity than the target set by DOE for 2017.