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Andrew Sessler wins Fermi Award

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

President Obama has named Andrew Sessler, award-winning theoretical physicist, acclaimed humanitarian, and former director of Berkeley Lab, as a recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, the government's oldest and most prestigious prizes for scientific achievement.

Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

BOSS measures the universe to 1-percent accuracy

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. BOSS has measured the clustering of nearly 1.3 million galaxies spectroscopically, determining the "standard ruler" of the universe's large-scale structure to within one percent. This is the most precise such measurement ever made and likely to be the standard for years to come.

Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Funder: National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, DOE/US Department of Energy, Participating Institutions
Meeting: 223rd AAS Annual Meeting

Out-of-this-world first light images emerge from Gemini Planet Imager

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

After nearly a decade of development, construction and testing, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets orbiting around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

Meeting: 223rd AAS Annual Meeting

Protein puzzles and scientific solutions

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used powerful new capabilities to -- for the first time -- generate a complete 3-D model of a protein without making use of any previous clue to its structure.

A gluttonous plant reveals how its cellular power plant devours foreign DNA

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from Indiana University and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute have determined an epic expansion of a plant's mitochondrial genome via of horizontal gene transfer, acquiring six genome equivalents of foreign DNA. It is the first time that an organelle has captured entire "foreign" genomes, those from other organisms, and the first description of a land plant acquiring genes from green algae. This work is published December 20 in the journal Science.

Journal: Science
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research; NSF Long-term Ecological Research Program; NSF FSML

A micro-muscular breakthrough

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have demonstrated a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length faster than the blink of an eye.

Journal: Advanced Materials
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

X-ray laser maps important drug target

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have used one of the brightest X-ray sources on the planet to map the 3-D structure of an important cellular gatekeeper known as a G protein-coupled receptor, or GPCR, in a more natural state than possible before.

Journal: Science
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Role for sugar uptake in breast cancer revealed

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that aerobic glycolysis -- glucose metabolism in the presence of oxygen -- is not the consequence of the cancerous activity of malignant cells, as has been widely believed, but is itself a cancerous event.

Journal: Journal of Clinical Investigation
Funder: NIH/National Cancer Institute

Exposing the roots of the lithium battery problem

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have discovered that the dendrite problem that can cause lithium-ion batteries to short-circuit, overheat and possibly catch fire originates below the surface of the lithium electrode and not at the surface as has been widely believed.

Journal: Nature Materials
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

SOFS take to water

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab researchers have unveiled the first two-dimensional SOFs -- supramolecular organic frameworks -- that self-assemble in solution, an important breakthrough that holds implications for sensing and separation technologies, energy sciences, and biomimetics.

Journal: Journal of the American Chemical Society
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science