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As authors of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eight scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were important contributors to the research on global climate change that has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

More than 40 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employees are key scientific contributors to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which today, along with former Vice President Al Gore, won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

The analysis of a tiny green alga has uncovered hundreds of genes that are uniquely associated with carbon dioxide capture and generation of biomass. The genome also provides a glimpse back through time to the last common ancestor of plants and animals. The project, led by the DOE Joint Genome Institute, is featured in the Oct. 12 edition of the journal Science.

An Innovator Award totaling almost $8 million has been awarded to Joe Gray, director of the life sciences division of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, from the Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program. The award funds a project conceived by Gray and Laura Esserman, co-leaders of the University of California at San Francisco's Breast Oncology Program, to greatly improve breast cancer screening and reduce mortality from breast cancer.

When melting sodium at high pressures, the material goes through a transition in which its electrical conductivity drops threefold.

Smallpox is older than thought, according to results of a new technique reported in the Sept. 24 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Centers for Disease Control.

Researchers have located the spin transition zone of iron in Earth's lower mantle, a discovery which has profound geophysical implications.

Observations and climate model results confirm that human-induced warming of the planet is having a pronounced effect on the atmosphere's total moisture content.

The National Research Council's Beyond Einstein Program Assessment Committee has recommended that the Joint Dark Energy Mission, supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, be the first of NASA's Beyond Einstein cosmology missions to be developed and launched. One of three competing projects in the JDEM program is Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's SuperNova/Acceleration Probe, SNAP, a space-borne observatory with a powerful two-meter-class telescope and half-billion pixel imager.

Ultraconserved elements are DNA sequences, hundreds of base pairs long, that are 100-percent identical in mice, rats and humans. Their perfect conservation for over 80 million years was thought due to evolutionary pressure, such that if even one nucleotide changes, the organism would die. But in a new study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, knockout mice with deleted ultraconserved elements showed virtually no ill effects.