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The US Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is now operating the world's fastest science network, serving the entire national laboratory system, its supercomputing centers, and its major scientific instruments at 100 gigabits per second -- 10 times faster than its previous generation network.

Using the "Lyman-alpha forests" of tens of thousands of quasar spectra, the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has measured the large-scale structure of the early universe for the first time. No other technique can reach back over 10 billion years to probe baryon oscillations at a time when the expansion of the universe was still decelerating and dark energy was yet to turn on.

JBEI researchers have identified a gene in rice plants whose suppression improves both the extraction of xylan and the overall release of the sugars needed to make biofuels.

Researchers using a free-electron X-ray laser have found a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a "supercharged," strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low.

Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that a fermentation process used in World War I to make cordite for bullets and artillery shells, in combination with a modern palladium catalyst could produce gasoline, diesel or jet fuel from the sugars found in biomass.

There's new hope in the fight against Huntington's disease. Berkeley Lab scientists have helped design a compound that suppresses symptoms of the devastating disease in mice. The compound is a synthetic antioxidant that targets mitochondria, an organelle that serves as a cell's power plant. Oxidative damage to mitochondria is implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases.

Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that a concept widely accepted as describing the folding of a single individual protein is also applicable to the self-assembly of multiple proteins. Their findings provide important guidelines for future biomimicry efforts, particularly for device fabrication and nanoscale synthesis.

Accurate tests of the beam quality of laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) assume new importance with the approaching advent of the one-meter-long, 10-billion-electron-volt Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), bringing the promise of "table-top accelerators" closer to realization. Accelerator scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have devised novel techniques for characterizing extraordinarily short beam pulses in the complex environment of LPAs, including the metric known as slice-energy spread.