News By Location

What makes the germ that causes plague so fearsomely lethal, while a close relative only produces digestive disorders and is rarely fatal? The answer may be in its genes – or rather, its lack of them.

SLAC's director remains "an enthusiastic champion" of the proposed International Linear Collider, despite a recent decision by a scientific panel recommending the adoption of a German technology. The panel spent eight months assessing the two technologies -- conventional room temperature ("warm") technology proposed by SLAC and its Japanese partner KEK, and superconducting ("cold") technology, which operates at near absolute zero, proposed by DESY. The panel selected DESY's "cold" technology for the ILC.

Another important step towards realizing the promise of lightning fast photonic technology has been taken by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley. These researchers have demonstrated that semiconductor nanoribbons can serve as "waveguides" for channeling and directing the movement of light through circuitry.

To close conspicuous gaps in our understanding of the tree of life, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) announces a heavy emphasis on microbes making up the list of organisms that will stoke the DNA sequencing engine of its Community Sequencing Program (CSP) over the coming year. The CSP selections represent a rich collection of microorganisms as well as higher plants and animals that inhabit both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.

DNA damage formed during carcinogenesis is just one of the topics researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will discuss during the 228th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.

In an unprecedented advance, researchers have armed the cell surfaces of living mice with a novel method of joining with chemical probes. The Staudinger ligation is a reaction between azide groups and phosphines, neither common in biological systems. The ability to tag cell surfaces in living beings may someday allow the targeting of specific kinds of cells for noninvasive imaging, for developmental studies, and for treatment of disease.

The Quantum Universe report focuses on nine fundamental questions in response to a request by two major research funding agencies, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. A string of recent discoveries in astronomy has left scientists with an unsettling realization: The stuff we know and understand makes up less than 5 percent of the universe.. The rest has to be yet-unknown forms of "dark matter" and "dark energy."

What on earth is an inverse femtobarn and what does it have to do with the number of events an accelerator produces?Fittingly, it was in the farmlands of the Midwest that the term 'barn' was first applied to physics. In December 1942, at a dinner on the campus of Purdue University, physicists M. G. Holloway and C. P. Parker were lamenting the lack of a catchy name for discussing the size of an atomic nucleus.

New research demonstrates that telomere crisis is an important early event in the development of breast cancer, and its occurrence can be identified with precision. Telomere crisis occurs when a cell's telomeres become too short, chromosomes become unstable, and damage-control mechanisms kick in to kill the cell. But in rare cases cells activate telomerase, which can maintain dangerously short telomeres. Cells may then proliferate indefinitely to become cancerous.

Pharmaceutical companies seeking to design more effective cancer chemotherapy agents may have an easier road ahead than was previously believed. A team of researchers has shown that two of the most promising anti-cancer drug families, the taxanes, which include Taxoltm, and the epothilones, have their own unique and independent mechanisms for combating the spread of tumors.