Carbon dioxide has emerged as a secret ingredient in the recipe for making ethanol, and that addition represents a major step forward in streamlining the biofuel production process. The innovation comes from researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) working at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI).

Many households in impoverished regions around the world are starting to shift away from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting—such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns—to solar-LED systems. While this trend has tremendous environmental benefits, a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that it spurs economic development as well, to the tune of 2 million potential new jobs.

In an advance that helps pave the way for next-gen electronics and computing technologies—and possibly paper-thin gadgets —scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a way to chemically assemble transistors and circuits that are only a few atoms thick. What's more, their method yields functional structures at a scale large enough to begin thinking about real-world applications and c...

Doctors have a powerful arsenal of cancer-fighting chemotherapy drugs to choose from, though a key challenge is to better target these drugs to kill tumors while limiting their potentially harmful side effects. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are helping to develop and test materials for a device that can be inserted via a tiny tube into a vein and soak up most of these drug...

  Researchers from the University of Washington are using supercomputers at Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and data from X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) experiments to gain new insights into warm dense matter (WDM), one of the most challenging aspects of contemporary plasma physics.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) report a major advance in understanding how oxygen oxidation creates extra capacity in cathodes, opening the door to batteries with far higher energy density, meaning your phone or electric vehicle will be able to run for much longer between charges.

An international team working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has captured the first high-resolution 3D images from individual double-helix DNA segments attached at either end to gold nanoparticles. The images detail the flexible structure of the DNA segments, which appear as nanoscale jump ropes.

When it comes to the various nanowidgets scientists are developing, nanotubes are especially intriguing. That's because hollow tubes that have diameters of only a few billionths of a meter have the potential to be incredibly useful, from delivering cancer-fighting drugs inside cells to desalinating seawater. But building nanostructures is difficult. And creating a large quantity of nanostructures with the same trait, such as millions of nanotubes...

Since the 1990s, scientists have been aware that for the past several billion years, the universe has been expanding at an accelerated rate. They have further hypothesised that some form of invisible energy must be responsible for this, one which makes up 68.3% of the mass-energy of the observable universe. While there is no direct evidence that this "dark energy" exists, plenty of indirect evidence has been obtained by observing the large-scale ...

When scientists Daniel Riley and Jared Schwede left Stanford University last year to join Cyclotron Road, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) program for entrepreneurial researchers, their vision was to take thermionics, an all-but-forgotten technology, and develop it into a clean, compact, and efficient source of power.

Electrons can extend our view of microscopic objects well beyond what's possible with visible light—all the way to the atomic scale. A popular method in electron microscopy for looking at tough, resilient materials in atomic detail is called STEM, or scanning transmission electron microscopy, but the highly-focused beam of electrons used in STEM can also easily destroy delicate samples.

In what may provide a potential path to processing information in a quantum computer, researchers have switched an intrinsic property of electrons from an excited state to a relaxed state on demand using a device that served as a microwave 'tuning fork'. The team’s findings could also lead to enhancements in magnetic resonance techniques, which are widely used to explore the structure of materials and biomolecules and for medical imaging.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown for the first time that an enzyme can be tweaked to reduce lignin in plants. Their technique could help lower the cost of converting biomass into carbon-neutral fuels to power your car and other sustainably developed bio-products. Lignin is a polymer that's important to a plant's health and structure. But lignin also permeates plant cel...

The past century has seen a 0.8°C (1.4°F) increase in average global temperature and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the overwhelming source of this increase has been emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants from human activities.