News By Location

Scientists with the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.

The National Cancer Institute today announced awards totaling over $35.5 million to establish a network of teams that will investigate how to detect cancer by finding cancer-specific proteins and protein patterns in blood samples. The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a leading member of the team based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in partnership with the University of California at San Francisco and the Buck Institute for Age Research.

Kenneth Raymond of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is the recipient of a $998,325 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), as principal investigator of a program to develop new agents for large scale radiological treatment of humans. The grant is one of five awards announced today under the federal government's Project Bioshield.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Advanced Wastewater Management Centre, University of Queensland, Australia, have published the first metagenomic study of an activated sludge wastewater treatment process. The research provides a blueprint of the genes and hence the metabolic possibilities of the wastewater environment, a view to understand how the system works and predicting and averting failures or crashes.

In a precedent-shattering demonstration of the potential of laser wakefield acceleration, scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with colleagues at the University of Oxford, have accelerated electron beams to energies exceeding a billion electron volts (1 GeV) in a distance of just 3.3 centimeters. Billion-electron-volt beams from laser wakefield accelerators open the way to very compact high-energy experiments and superbright free-electron lasers.

Scientists from the University of Toronto, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, and others with the SuperNova Legacy Survey have found startling evidence of more than one kind of Type Ia supernova, a class of exploding stars which until now has been regarded as essentially uniform in all important respects. Half again as massive as a typical Type Ia, SNLS-03D3bb suggests caution in extrapolating distance measurements from these cosmological standard candles.

By combining very large-scale molecular dynamics simulations with time-resolved data from laser experiments of shock wave propagation through specific metals, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are now able to better understand the evolution of high-strain-rate plasticity.

Researchers have now characterized the unique lifestyle of a gutless worm that commutes through marine sediments powered by a community of symbiotic microbial specialists harbored just under its skin, obviating the need for digestive and excretory systems. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute have described this complex worm/microbe quid pro quo revealed by DNA sequencing and other diagnostic techniques in the Sept. 17 edition of the journal Nature.

Wood from a common tree may one day factor prominently in meeting transportation fuel needs, according to scientists whose research on the fast-growing poplar tree is featured on the cover of tomorrow's edition of the journal Science.

New research shows that rising sea surface temperatures in hurricane "breeding grounds" of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are unlikely to be purely natural in origin. These findings complement earlier work that uncovered compelling scientific evidence of a link between warming SSTs and increases in hurricane intensity.