News By Location

Researchers have discovered how Pairing Centers on the chromosomes of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans work to ensure that the chromosomes of its sperm and eggs are matched and recombined accurately during meiosis. The discoveries hold promise for understanding aspects of infertility in humans.

The first-ever complete quantum-mechanical solution of a system with four charged particles, namely the photoionization of a hydrogen molecule, has been achieved by an international group of collaborators from the University of California, universities in Spain and Belgium, and DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The computational breakthrough was inspired by experiments at the Advanced Light Source measuring the position and momentum of both electrons and protons resulting from the photofragmentation of molecular hydrogen.

A geophysicist from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has identified possible seismic precursors to two recent California earthquakes, including the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that wreaked havoc throughout the Bay Area. After sifting through seismic data from the two quakes, Valeri Korneev found a spike in the number of micro-earthquakes followed by a period of relative calm in the crust surrounding the quakes' epicenters -- months before the quakes occurred.

If humans continue to use fossil fuels in a business as usual manner for the next several centuries, the polar ice caps will be depleted, ocean sea levels will rise by seven meters and median air temperatures will soar 14.5 degrees warmer than current day.

Planting trees across the United States and Europe to absorb some of the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels may just outweigh the positive effects of sequestering that CO².

A new measurement in quantum electrodynamics – an extension of quantum mechanics – is 10 times more precise than any recent measurements.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have uncovered key new information towards understanding the crucial first step in protein synthesis, the process by which the genetic code, harbored within DNA and copied into RNA, is translated into the production of proteins. This new information also helps to explain how viruses, such as Hepatitis C, are able to highjack protein synthesis machinery in humans for their own purposes.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have successfully conducted an important round of successful laser experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), validating key computer simulations and theoretical projections relevant to the plasma and X-ray environment necessary to achieve ignition.

Computer scientists and biologists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed software that can select tens of thousands of high-quality images of biological molecules from electron microgaphs, rapidly and automatically, with accuracy approaching that of experienced human analysts. The new algorithm, described as "particle picking by segmentation," promises to greatly increase the speed and power of methods for determining biological structures at high resolution, based on data from electron microscopy.

The fourth version of the Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system of the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) has been made available. The new version, IMG 1.3, contains 42 additional genomes sequenced by other institutions and 20 new genomes sequenced by JGI, bringing the total number of genomes in IMG to 674 (373 bacterial, 26 archeal, 15 eukaryotic, 260 viral), of which 44 are finished and 90 are draft genomes sequenced by JGI.