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A geochemist from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, teaming with researchers from the Royal Ontario Museum, the University of Hawaii and Moscow State University, has accurately dated Calcium Aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), the oldest objects in our solar system, to be 4.57 billion years old.

Magnesium diboride (MgB2) becomes superconducting at 39 degrees Kelvin, one of the highest known transition temperatures (Tc) of any superconductor. What's more, its puzzling characteristics include more than one superconducting energy gap, a state of affairs anticipated in theory but never before seen experimentally. Now theorists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have calculated the properties of this unique superconductor from first principles, revealing the secrets of its anomalous behavior.

A Bose-Einstein condensate, a form of matter heretofore only observed in atoms chilled to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, may now have been observed at temperatures in excess of one degree Kelvin in excitons, the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as electronic devices.

Researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have determined that the depth of an injection of carbon dioxide into the deep ocean is a good predictor of how effective that location is at sequestering carbon away from the atmosphere.

In their continuing search for new clues to how human genes function and how vertebrates develop and evolve, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) are gearing up to map the DNA of a diminutive, fast-growing African frog named Xenopus tropicalis.

Alfalfa plants are being used as miniature gold factories that could provide the nanotechnology industry with a continuous harvest of gold nanoparticles. An international research team advanced the work at the SSRL facility - part of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California. Researchers are using alfalfa's physiological need to extract metals from their growth medium. The alfalfa extracts and stores gold as specks less than a billionth of a meter across.

The best of modern science may save the most glorious of historic wrecks-the 17th century warship Vasa. Using minimally destructive analytical techniques, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) worked with marine conservators from Sweden to discover what's eating the beautiful warship. The results were published in the February 21, 2002, issue of Nature.

An international research consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) reported today on the draft sequencing, assembly, and analysis of the genome of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes. The report was released on Science Magazine's "Science Express" Website (http://www.sciencemag.org/sciencexpress/recent.shtml).

An international research consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute reported today (7/25) on the draft sequencing, assembly, and analysis of the genome of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes. Through comparison of the human and pufferfish genomes, the researchers were able to predict the existence of nearly 1,000 previously unidentified human genes. These additional hypothetical human genes are of largely unknown function, but contribute to the complete catalog of human genes.

The BaBar collaboration at DOE's SLAC announced their new measurement of sine two beta, a parameter that expresses the degree of asymmetry between matter and antimatter. To establish experimentally the effect that allowed matter to dominate has been a central theme in high-energy physics research. This result is the product of three years of intense research and is a classic example of how understanding of our universe advances through high energy physics research.