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A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology teamed up to develop a new tool, called the Materials Project, to help find new materials crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles.,

Taking advantage of massive-scale sequencing and data analysis capabilities, the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will serve up trillions of nucleotides of information from newly-selected projects geared to feed the data-hungry worldwide research community. The total allocation for the 2012 Community Sequencing Program portfolio will exceed 30 trillion bases (terabases), a 100-fold increase compared with just two years ago, when just a third of a terabase was allocated to more than 70 projects.

Researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute have developed the first genome-scale model for predicting the functions of genes and gene networks in a grass species. Called RiceNet, this systems-level model of rice gene interactions should help speed the development of new crops for the production of advanced biofuels, as well as help boost the production and improve the quality of one of the world's most important food staples.

By embedding fixed arrays of gold nanoparticles into fluid lipid bilayers, Berkeley Lab scientists can study with unprecedented detail how the spatial patterns of chemical and physical properties on membranes can determine the fate of a cell -- whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source and Center for X-Ray Optics are working with colleagues at leading semiconductor manufacturers to build SHARP, the world's most advanced extreme-ultraviolet microscope, to study and design the photolithography masks, materials, patterns, and architectures essential to the next generation of integrated circuits.

Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter shares the prize with Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University and Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University.

By shaking not stirring their solutions, Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry have been able to engineer two-dimensional, biomimetic nanosheets with atomic precision for a wide range of applications, including the creation of platforms for sensing molecules or membranes for filtration. To enable this self-assembly of 2D nanosheets they have developed a programmable vial rocking device they call a "SheetRocker."