News By Location

WHETHER it's the mechanics of a supernova, the ignition of an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsule, or the detonation of a nuclear weapon, simulating the motion of fluids is anything but simple. Every piece of the model is moving. Fluids interact with each other and with solid materials, plus those interactions occur quickly and at intense pressures and temperatures.

The rapid, violent detonation of a high explosive (HE) generates supersonic shock waves that transfer energy by moving mass. According to Livermore physicist John Molitoris, trying to gather data on what happens to a material during this split second is often a case of "smoke and mirrors."

For the first time a human disease has been linked to specific defects in the three-dimensional folding of chromatin. Young girls affected with Rett Syndrome become withdrawn and anxious and develop autistic-like behaviors. The devastating neurological disease was recently tracked to mutations in a gene on the X chromosome, MECP2. How the mutated gene causes the disorder has now been revealed by a team of scientists with the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

SLAC partnered with CalTech, Fermilab, CERN and the University of Florida, along with groups from the UK, Brazil and Korea to defend its title as one of the fastest guns in the West--or, more accurately, the largest bandwidth, which is the computing equivalent.

A collaboration of scientists led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has uncovered clues at the atomic level that could lead to a new generation of much tougher advanced ceramics to be used in applications like gas turbine engines.

A new roadmap to the location of DNA segments that are significant in medical, biological and evolutionary research could emerge from studies published today (Dec. 9) by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and their colleagues. The work is reported in the online version of the journal Genome Research.

Using biominerals as an inspiration, Livermore physicist Jim De Yoreo and his LLNL research team have determined a key factor in how to manipulate the shapes of crystals.

A team of scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, has shown that the energy required to "measurably distort" the molecular structure of liquid water is the same as the energy required to melt ice. This could explain why a study last spring out of Stanford University seemed to contradict what was has long been believed about the molecular structure of liquid water.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley have good news for the burgeoning nanotechnology industry. They've shown that for nanocrystals, the doping process in which one type of positively charged atom, or cation, is exchanged for another, take place at a much faster rate than for crystals of extended size, and is fully reversible, something that is virtually forbidden in micro-sized crystals under the same environmental conditions.

An ion-beam system that simultaneously combines focused beams of electrons and positive ions will improve the versatility, efficiency, and economy of this important technology by creating self-neutralizing beams that do not charge the target. Focused ion beams are important in the semiconductor industry and find increasing use in imaging surfaces, patterning magnetic thin-films, investigating biological systems, and micromachining miniature medical implants.