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It takes a global village to monitor and analyze trends in Earth's "breathing" -- or the exchange of carbon dioxide, water vapor and energy between plants and the planet's atmosphere. Hundreds of science groups have planted more than 500 micrometeorological towers across five continents to monitor these exchanges every 30 minutes.

Using the unique capabilities of the Chemical Dynamics Beamline at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source, researchers have demonstrated that ozone can react with the nicotine in secondhand tobacco smoke to form ultrafine particles that may become a bigger threat to asthma sufferers than nicotine itself.

Working with the unique nanoscience capabilities of Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, a multi-institutional team of researchers has developed the first model of signal-to-noise-ratios for low frequency noises in graphene on silica. Their results show noise patterns that run just the opposite of noise patterns in other electronic materials.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California at Berkeley used pulses of laser light measuring mere quintillionths of a second long to probe the motion of an atom's outermost electrons in real time. Their methods promises a broad new way to examine how atoms in physical, biological, and chemical systems bond with other atoms to form molecules or crystal structures, and how these bonds break and reform during chemical reactions.

By putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene, Berkeley Lab researchers have created pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory. This finding opens a new window on a source of important applications and fundamental scientific discoveries going back over a century.