News By Location

A study of the genome of Ciona intestinalis - the sea squirt - by an international consortium of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute has yielded new insights into the origins of complex biological systems. Results are reported in the December 13, 2002, issue of the journal Science.

Using models that simulate the interaction between global climate and land ecosystems, atmospheric scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have shown that compensating for the carbon dioxide "greenhouse effect" by decreasing the amount of sunlight reaching the planet (geoengineering) could create a more vigorous ecosystem while helping to curb global warming.

The streamlined genome of Ciona intestinalis, a common sea squirt closely related to vertebrates on the evolutionary tree, is providing new clues about the evolutionary origins of key vertebrate systems and structures including the human brain, spine, heart, eye, thyroid gland, and nervous and immune systems.

A researcher from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and colleagues from Colorado State University on Tuesday will show that forest fires likely contributed to periods of regional haze in Yosemite National Park in 2002.

Using a computer code originally developed for combat simulation, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are supplying the same expertise that analyzes concepts of operation, technology and training to emergency responders as a part of the Lab's role in homeland security.

Results from the first six months of experiments at KamLAND, an underground neutrino detector in central Japan, show that anti-neutrinos emanating from nearby nuclear reactors are "disappearing," which indicates they have mass and can oscillate or change from one type to another. As anti-neutrinos are the anti-matter counterpart to neutrinos, these results provide independent confirmation of earlier studies involving solar neutrinos and show that the Standard Model of Particle Physics is in need of updating.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory engineers are developing a microelectrode array for a multi-laboratory DOE project to construct an artificial retina or "epiretinal prosthesis."

Berkeley Lab researchers, working with researchers at Cornell University and Japan's Ritsumeikan University, have made a serendipitous discovery which indicates that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight-from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet-to electrical current.

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center has signed a contract with IBM to double the size of NERSC's 3,328-processor RS/6000 SP supercomputer, creating a machine with a peak speed of 10 teraflop/s (10 trillion floating point operations per second).

As part of a new multidisciplinary structural biology program, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory unexpectedly discovered a protein interface they call the Rad50 "zinc hook," used by an essential protein complex to link broken DNA strands. These first results from the new program were published in the August 1, 2002, issue of Nature.