News By Location

Current methods for estimating the ground-shaking effects of major earthquakes could underestimate their severity and lead to inadequate seismic protection of new and existing buildings, according to a pioneering study of earthquake hazards at three University of California campuses – Riverside (UCR), San Diego (UCSD), and Santa Barbara (UCSB).

A team of scientists, including two from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have identified a new method to measure the amount of stratospheric ozone that is present at any given time in the upper troposphere.

Computer models are helping Laboratory engineers better understand the homogeneous compression charge ignition engine, a fuel-efficient engine with reduced harmful emissions.

The Laboratory's pathogen bioinformatics group is developing ways to rapidly identify microbes that could pose a threat to the nation's citizens, livestock, and crops.

Livermore researchers are designing a rugged system to prevent nuclear wastes from seeping into the environment at the proposed underground repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

Water - one of nature's fundamental elements - is still a mystery. A team of scientists at SSRL, Stockholm University, Linköping University (Sweden) and the University of Utrecht (Holland) achieved a breakthrough in understanding the structure of liquid water. They found that water molecules clump much more loosely than previously thought. The research was supported by NSF, DOE, NIH and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the Swedish Natural Science Research Council.

A first-of-its-kind x-ray microscope being built for the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) holds forth the promise of "cat scans" for biological cells, and other unprecedented capabilities for cell and molecular biology studies.

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and Stanford University report today the completion of the sequencing of human Chromosome 19, the most gene-rich of all the human chromosomes. This achievement is described in the April 1, 2004 edition of the journal Nature.

By measuring polarized light from an unusual exploding star, an international team of astrophysicists and astronomers has worked out the first detailed picture of a Type Ia supernova and the distinctive star system in which it exploded. Spectropolarimetry suggests that supernova 2002ic exploded inside a flat, clumpy disk of dust and gas, previously blown away from a companion star. The configuration resembles a protoplanetary nebula, objects well known in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Remote-detection nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) depends on physically separating the two basic steps of signal encoding and detection -- normally carried out in the same instrument -- in order to customize each step for the best results. Using laser-polarized xenon gas to "remember" the encoded information and carry it to the remote detection site, researchers have achieved remarkable improvements in MRI image resolution and manifold increases in NMR sensitivity.