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A Berkeley Lab-University of Copenhagen collaboration found that luminal-like breast cancer cells with no detectable stem cell qualities can generate larger tumors than their basal-like counterparts. This contradicts prevailing beliefs and could impact future breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

Some rare cosmic rays pack an astonishing wallop, with energies prodigiously greater than particles in human-made accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider. Their sources are unknown, although scientists favor active galacti nuclei or gamma-ray bursts. If so, gamma-ray bursts should produce ultra-high-energy neutrinos, but scientists searching for these with IceCube, the giant neutrino telescope at the South Pole to which Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has made key contributions, have found exactly zero. The mystery deepens.

BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey, with scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in principal leadership roles. First spectroscopic results from BOSS give the most detailed look yet at the time when dark energy turned on some six billion light years ago, as the expansion of the universe was slipping from the grasp of matter's mutual gravitational attraction, and expansion began to accelerate.

Joint BioEnergy Institute researchers have developed a "dynamic sensor-regulator system" that can detect metabolic changes in microbes during the production of fatty acid-based fuels or chemicals and control the expression of genes affecting that production. The result in one demonstration was a threefold increase in the microbial production of biodiesel from glucose.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed a technique for lacing artificial membranes with billions of gold nanoantennas that can boost optical signals from a protein tens of thousands of times without the protein ever being touched. This technique could provide a critical tool in the fight against a wide range of health problems including cancer.

A comparative genomic analysis of two white rot fungi whose genomes were generated and annotated at the DOE JGI was published in PNAS this week. Both fungi are of interest to bioenergy researchers because they possess enzymes that can break down plant biomass and could therefore be useful for accelerating biofuels production. The study revealed substantial differences among the sets of genes involved in lignocellulose degradation.

At Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, scientists have provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film. These results also show how such organic films can be chemically modified to improve conductance for superior organic electronics.