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How many Nobel laureates do you know well enough to nickname?

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

For Mark Allen (EC), a member of the BaBar collaboration and a graduate student of Aaron Roodman (EC), the answer is now 18. Allen was one of 64 young scientists from the U.S. to attend a five-day symposium of Nobel prize winners in the cobblestoned medieval city of Lindau on a tiny island in the south of Germany. Most of the laureates and researchers who attended this year are, like Allen, physicists.

New light on how metals change shape at the nanoscale

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Pittsburgh scientists, working at the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have found that the prominent method of deformation in nanocrystalline metals is not dislocation but sliding of grain boundaries past one another, allowing the grains to rotate and fit together in new ways. The observation may help researchers take advantage of the fact that as the grain size of a metal shrinks, it can become many times stronger.

Journal: Science
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation

Physicists discover dramatic difference in behavior of matter versus antimatter

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The BaBar experiment at SLAC, a DOE laboratory operated by Stanford, submitted exciting new results demonstrating a dramatic difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter to Physical Review Letters. SLAC's PEP-II accelerator collides electrons and positrons to produce an abundance of B and anti-B mesons. BaBar experimenters discovered striking matter-antimatter asymmetry by a phenomenon known as direct charge parity (CP) violation.

Journal: Physical Review Letters
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

A new advance in gallium nitride nanowires

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A significant breakthrough in the development of the highly prized semiconductor, gallium nitride, as a building block for nanotechnology, has been achieved. For the first time ever, researchers have been able control the direction in which a gallium nitride nanowire grows. Growth direction is critical to determining the wire's electrical and thermal conductivity and other important properties.

Journal: Nature Materials

Laboratory scientists contribute to NASA Mercury MESSENGER Mission

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team of scientists and engineers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, have designed and built a high resolution gamma-ray detector that will enable NASA's Mercury Messenger to measure the elemental composition of the planet's crust.

DOE Office of Science INCITE program seeks proposals for large-scale scientific computing

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

Proposals are now being accepted for a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science program to support innovative, large-scale computational science projects. Now in its second year, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program will award a total of 5.5 million supercomputer processor hours and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Oxygen sensing in worms may hold key to healthy blood pressure in humans

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have discovered the mechanism used by the soil-dwelling nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to sense oxygen levels in its environment, allowing it to feed in areas where the concentration of oxygen is just right. The same mechanism may be present in fish and other animals that live in environments where the oxygen levels fluctuate, and may also be similar to the mechanism the human body uses to deal with oxygen deficiency.

Journal: Nature
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, University of California, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

This instrument keeps the beat

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

As part of their responsibilities for stewardship of the nation's nuclear stockpile, Livermore researchers study the behavior of materials detonated with high explosives or struck with projectiles at extreme velocities. In diagnosing these experiments, researchers must measure velocities as great as 3,000 meters per second over distances from less than 0.5 millimeter to more than 50 millimeters.

Nuclear energy to go: A self-contained, portable reactor

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Nuclear energy supplies 20 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. and 16 percent of that used throughout the world. But as the global use of nuclear energy grows, so do concerns about the vulnerability of nuclear plants and fuel materials to misuse or attacks by terrorists.

Helping water managers ensure clean and reliable supplies

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

MOST Americans take cheap and plentiful supplies of pure drinking water for granted. Some even consider it to be an inalienable right. However, clean water sources, especially pristine underground aquifers, are being consumed at an increasing rate, and contaminants and changing patterns in rain and snowfall are threatening the adequacy of supplies.