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Foot and mouth disease may spread through shedding skin cells

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Skin cells shed from livestock infected with foot and mouth disease could very well spread the disease. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist Michael Dillon proposed that virus-infected skin cells could be a source of infectious foot and mouth disease virus aerosols. His proposal is based on the facts that foot and mouth disease virus is found in skin and that airborne skin cells are known to transmit other diseases.

Electronic life on the edge

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and their colleagues have used new techniques to confirm the existence of long-predicted edge states in graphene nanoribbons, opening new prospects for characterizing and controlling the electronic, spintronic, magnetic, and optical properties of nanoscale devices.

Journal: Nature Physics
Funder: US Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy's Office of Science

It takes a community of soil microbes to protect plants from disease

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Plants rely on a tight-knit army of soil microbes to defend themselves against pathogens, much the way mammals harbor a raft of microbes to avoid infections. The discovery, led by a Berkeley Lab team that used the PhyloChip, could help scientists develop ways to better protect the world's food crops from devastating diseases. The scientists deciphered, for the first time, the group of microbes that enables a patch of soil to suppress a plant-killing pathogen

Journal: Science

Spikemoss genome offers new paths for biofuels research -- bridges plant development gap

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The Selaginella genome helps fill in a large gap in plant evolution from unicellular green alga to flowering plants with vascular systems. Plants rely on lignin to keep vascular tissues upright, but biofuels researchers see lignin's rigid structure as a hindrance to using plants as potential bioenergy feedstocks. The Selaginella genome is already being used to study the pathways by which three different types of lignin are synthesized in plants.

Journal: Science
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Formidable fungal force counters biofuel plant pathogens

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An international team of researchers compared two rust fungal genomes to identify the characteristics by which these pathogens can invade their plant hosts and to develop biocontrol methods. The first tree pathogen was sequenced by DOE JGI because poplar leaf rust outbreaks weaken poplar trees, a candidate bioenergy feedstock. M. larici-populina was compared here with the wheat stem rust fungus sequenced by the Broad Institute that causes major epidemics of both barley and wheat worldwide.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: US Department of Energy's Office of Science

Hydrogen fuel tech gets boost from low-cost, efficient catalyst

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists have engineered a cheap, abundant alternative to the expensive platinum catalyst and coupled it with a light-absorbing electrode to make hydrogen fuel from sunlight and water. The discovery, published last week in Nature Materials, is an important development in the worldwide effort to mimic the way plants make fuel from sunlight, a key step in creating a green energy economy.

Journal: Nature Materials
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, Technical University of Denmark

Measuring the distant universe in 3-D

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars over 10 billion light years away to show the distribution of intergalactic clouds of gas, has been announced by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The result proves that the technique, never attempted before, can be used to study dark energy in the early universe.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Meeting: American Physical Society 2011 April Meeting

A surprise: China's energy consumption will stabilize

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Well before 2050, according to a new study by Berkeley Lab's China Energy Group, China's energy use will level off, even as its population edges past 1.4 billion. There will come a time--within the next two decades--when the number of people in China acquiring cars, larger homes, and other accouterments of industrialized societies will peak. Between 2030 and 2035, the steeply rising curve of energy demand in China will begin to moderate and flatten thereafter.

Funder: Department of Energy

In the wake of the wind

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

On the Front Range within the Rocky Mountains, prevailing winds sweep eastward over the mountains smack into the National Wind Technology Center. Several wind turbines, some taller than a 40-story building, spin and hum at the site, just outside of Boulder, Colo., waiting for an experiment to start in the next month.

Anti-helium discovered in the heart of STAR

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Antimatter nuclei of helium-4, the heaviest antiparticles ever found, have been created in the STAR experiment of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Eighteen examples of the antihelium particles were detected by STAR's Time Projection Chamber, designed and built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in debris from a billion high-energy collisions of gold nuclei.

Journal: Nature
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy