News By Location

If the world continues to burn greenhouse gases, California may have an increased risk of winter floods and summer water shortages, even within the same year. This scenario may be more severe in future El Nino years.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have harnessed the way seawater freezes to develop a porous, scaffolding-like material that is four times stronger than material currently used in synthetic bone. Although still in the investigational stages, variations of this substance could also be used in a myriad of applications in which strength and lightness are imperative, such as dental implants, airplane manufacturing and computer hardware.

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered a new planet five times the size of Earth, the smallest extrasolar planet unearthed to date outside of our solar system. Using a network of telescopes scattered across the globe, the group discovered the extrasolar planet is more Earth-like than any other planet found so far. It circles its parent star every 10 years. The discovery opens a new chapter in the search for planets that support life.

A team based in Livermore has shed some light on the phase diagram of carbon at high pressure and temperature.

Carbon nanotubes used in the electronics such as cell phones might have a longer life thanks to a strengthening technique pioneered by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Boston College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

With the exception of lasers and free-electron lasers, there hasn't been another fundamental way to produce coherent light for close to 50 years.

A team of researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley used x-ray crystallography at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) to determine the crystal structure of Dicer, an enzyme that plays a critical role in the process known as RNA interference. The Dicer enzyme is able to snip a double-stranded form of RNA into segments that can attach themselves to genes and block their activity.

The Department of Energy's investment in large-scale genome sequencing is paying dividends with powerful implications for the nation's energy and environmental clean-up needs, according to a report just released by the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI). As the leading national user facility targeting microbes and microbial communities, plants, and aquatic organisms, DOE JGI is serving to close a critical gap of knowledge while unlocking the potential of this largely unexplored cache of the planet's living matter.

Responding to the escalating demand for genome sequencing to unlock the potential of plants and microbes as fuel for the nation's energy needs, the US Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has announced the call for 2007 Community Sequencing Program (CSP) proposals.

A team of astronomers has found faint visible 'echoes' of three ancient supernovae by detecting centuries-old light reflected by interstellar gas clouds hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions.