News By Location

17-Jan-2013

Doubling down on energy efficiency

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Spending on energy efficiency programs funded by electric and natural gas utility customers will double by 2025 to about $9.5 billion per year, according to projections published by researchers at Berkeley Lab. According to the report, energy efficiency programs funded by utility customers are projected to continue expanding beyond the traditional bastions of energy efficiency in the Northeast and West.

Funder

US Department of Energy's Offices of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability

17-Jan-2013

New key to organism complexity identified

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers have discovered that the transcription factor protein TFIID coexists in two distinct structural states, a key to genetic expression and TFIID's ability to initiate the process by which DNA is copied into RNA.

Journal

Cell

Funder

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, National Institutes of Health

10-Jan-2013

Oxygen to the core

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An international collaboration including researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has discovered that the Earth's core formed under more oxidizing condition's than previously proposed.

Journal

Science

9-Jan-2013

The farthest supernova yet for measuring cosmic history

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In 2004 the Supernova Cosmology Project based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a tantalizing supernova that appeared to be almost 10 billion light-years distant. But researchers had to wait years until a new camera was installed on the Hubble before they could confirm the spectrum and light curve of supernova SCP-0401--the supernova furthest back in time useful for precise measures of the expansion history of the universe.

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Space Telescope Science Institute

Meeting

221st Meeting of the American Astronomical Society

7-Jan-2013

New path to more efficient organic solar cells uncovered at Berkeley Lab's advanced light source

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Working at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source, an international team of scientists found that for highly efficient polymer/organic solar cells, size matters. Impure domains if made sufficiently small can lead to improved performances in polymer-based organic photovoltaics.

Journal

Advanced Energy Materials

Funder

US Department of Energy's Office of Science

4-Jan-2013

A new way to study permafrost soil, above and below ground

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A group of researchers that includes scientists from Berkeley Lab have developed a new way to explore the little-known world of permafrost soils, which store almost as much carbon as the rest of the world's soils and about twice as much as is in the atmosphere. The new approach combines several remote-sensing tools to study the Arctic landscape, above and below ground, in high resolution and over large spatial scales.

3-Jan-2013

How computers push on the molecules they simulate

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Simulations are essential to test theories and explore what's inaccessible to direct experiment. Digital computers can't use exact, continuous equations of motion and have to slice time into chunks, so persistent errors are introduced in the form of "shadow work" that distorts the result. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley have learned to separate the physically realistic aspects of the simulation from the artifacts of the computer method.

Journal

Physical Review X

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation

21-Dec-2012

Boosting galactan sugars could boost biofuel production

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

JBEI researcher have identified the first enzyme capable of substantially boosting the amount of galactan sugars in plant cell walls. Readily fermented, galactan sugars are a target of interest for researchers in advanced biofuels produced from cellulosic biomass.

Journal

The Plant Cell

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, Office of Science

19-Dec-2012

Unraveling the threads: Simplest cotton genome offers clues for fiber improvements

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An international consortium including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers published a high-quality draft assembly of the simplest cotton genome in the Dec. 20, 2012 issue of Nature. In the study, researchers traced the evolution of cotton and fiber development over millions of years. Additionally, bioenergy researchers hope to learn more about cellulose biosynthesis from the genome as each cotton strand is made of several cellulose coils, a target biomass for next-generation biofuels.

Journal

Nature

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy

17-Dec-2012

Flexing fingers for micro-robotics: Berkeley Lab scientists create a powerful, microscale actuator

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an elegant and powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a tiny beckoning finger. Based on an oxide material that expands and contracts dramatically in response to a small temperature variation, the actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are promising for microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.

Journal

Nano Letters

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation