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Climate models underestimate global warming by exaggerating cloud brightening

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Yale University have found that climate models are aggressively making clouds 'brighter' as the planet warms. This may be causing models to underestimate how much global warming will occur due to increasing carbon dioxide. The research appears in the April 8 edition of Science.

Journal: Science

Existing state laws collectively require a 50 percent increase in US renewable electricity

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

State renewables portfolio standards, known as RPS policies, have contributed to more than half of all renewable electricity growth in the United States since 2000. Most state RPS requirements will continue to rise through at least 2020, if not beyond, and collectively these policies will require substantial further growth in US renewable electricity supplies. These findings are part of a new annual status report on state RPS policies from Berkeley Lab.

Funder: National Electricity Delivery Division of the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability of the US Department of Energy

World's fastest electron diffraction snapshots of atomic motions in gases

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists have made a significant advance toward making movies of extremely fast atomic processes with potential applications in energy production, chemistry, medicine, materials science and more. Using a superfast, high-resolution 'electron camera,' a new instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, researchers have captured the world's fastest UED images of nitrogen molecules rotating in a gas, with a record shutter speed of 100 quadrillionths of a second.

Berkeley Lab working on key components for LCLS-II x-ray lasers

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Business Announcement

Berkeley Lab scientists are developing some key components for X-ray lasers that will produce the brightest X-rays on the planet and up to 1 million X-ray pulses per second.

Scientists push valleytronics 1 step closer to reality

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Berkeley Lab scientists have taken a big step toward the practical application of 'valleytronics,' which is a new type of electronics that could lead to faster and more efficient computer logic systems and data storage chips in next-generation devices. They experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, the ability to electrically generate and control valley electrons in a two-dimensional semiconductor.

Journal: Nature Nanotechnology

Tiny tubes move into the fast lane

DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

For the first time, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have shown that carbon nanotubes as small as eight-tenths of a nanometer in diameter can transport protons faster than bulk water, by an order of magnitude.

Journal: Nature Nanotechnology

Major upgrade will boost power of world's brightest X-ray laser

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Business Announcement

Construction begins today on a major upgrade to a unique X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The project will add a second X-ray laser beam that's 10,000 times brighter, on average, than the first one and fires 8,000 times faster, up to a million pulses per second.

X-rays reveal how a solar cell gets its silver stripes

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The silver electrical contacts that carry electricity out of about 90 percent of the solar modules on the market are also one of their most expensive parts. Now scientists from two Department of Energy national laboratories have used X-rays to observe exactly how those contacts form during manufacturing.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: SunShot Initiative

Proving the genetic code's flexibility

DOE/Joint Genome Institute
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Three-letter codons in a genome sequence can represent one of the 20 regularly used amino acids or stops. In the journal Angewandte Chemie International Ed., researchers from the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute and Yale University have discovered that microorganisms recognize more than one codon for selenocysteine. The finding adds credence to recent studies indicating that an organism's genetic vocabulary is not as constrained as had been long held.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Institute for General Medical Sciences' Human Genetic Repository

Revealing the fluctuations of flexible DNA in 3-D

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists have captured the first high-resolution 3-D images from individual double-helix DNA segments attached to gold nanoparticles, which could aid in the use of DNA segments as building blocks for molecular devices that function as nanoscale drug-delivery systems, markers for biological research, and components for electronic devices.

Journal: Nature Communications