News By Location

When we hear the term "MRI," most of us probably think of a special treatment room in a hospital with a huge doughnut- shaped machine that costs a lot of money and makes a lot of noise. Berkeley Lab researchers are looking to change that perception with the successful testing of a laser-based MRI technique that would make the technology compact and portable, relatively cheap and quiet.

By comparing the complete genome sequences of two plant-killing pathogens and related organisms, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, in collaboration with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and others, have uncovered crucial aspects of the disease-causing mechanisms of "sudden oak death" and soybean root rot disease. The research appears in the Sept. 1, 2006, edition of Science.

John Mather, Project Scientist of NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite mission, and eighteen members of COBE's Science Working Group, including George Smoot of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have jointly received the 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their ground-breaking studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Smoot was principal investigator of the differential microwave radiometer experiment, one of three experiments aboard COBE that shed light on the structure of the universe.

Some nanoscale crystals can be perfect, and scientists long assumed that a crystal needs to be perfect to sustain stress at its theoretical limit. Beyond this point, dislocations in the crystal lattice occur and the crystal undergoes plastic deformation. In new research at DOE's National Center for Electron Microscopy, Berkeley Lab scientists have discovered that in fact many defects can accumulate in a nanocrystal before the initial yield point of plastic deformation.

NASA has announced that it will support an advanced mission concept study for the SNAP experiment, a proposal for NASA and the Department of Energy's Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM). SNAP, the SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, is sponsored by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley, and numerous governmental and academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. It will probe dark energy with distant supernovae and weak gravitational lensing.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley used a combination of microscopic beads and magnetic tweezers to observe that when a DNA molecule is stretched, it actually begins to overwind. This overwinding continues until the force being applied to stretch the DNA exceeds about 30 picoNewtons. Beyond the 30 picoNewton threshold, the DNA double helix did begin to unwind in accordance with predictions.

Detecting biowarfare agents in the field will become a lot easier thanks to a new barcode system based on biosensing nanowires developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers.

Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, has won the €250,000 Feltrinelli International Prize in Physical and Mathematical Sciences of Rome's Lincei Academy, awarded once every five years in this field. Perlmutter is honored for his body of work, including observations leading to the discovery of the dark energy that accelerates the expansion of the universe.

The DNA sequence of Laccaria bicolor, a fungus that forms a beneficial symbiosis with trees and inhabits one of the most ecologically and commercially important microbial niches in North American and Eurasian forests, has been determined by the U.S. Department of Energy DOE Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI).

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have shown that the core machinery for initiating DNA replication is the same for all three domains of life -- Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya.