The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has announced the development of a transformative class of nanosheets, poised to revolutionise applications in electronics, energy storage, and health and safety, with an emphasis on sustainable manufacturing practices.

Researchers have developed a process for creating ultrathin, self-assembling sheets of synthetic materials that can function like designer flypaper in selectively binding with viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens. In this way the new platform, developed by a team led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), could potentially be used to inactivate or detect pathogens.

To see what is driving the exotic behaviour in some atomically thin – or 2D – materials, and find out what happens when they are stacked like Lego bricks in different combinations with other ultrathin materials, scientists want to observe their properties at the smallest possible scales. Enter MAESTRO, a next-generation platform for X-ray experiments at the ALS at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Labora...

A butterfly's wings and a peacock's feathers use nanoscale architecture to bend light and produce brilliant colours without pigments or dyes, and scientists have been trying to emulate nature's design. Now, scientists from mixed reality technology company Magic Leap Inc., working with researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), have developed new, versatile ways to control and enhance the l...

  A team of researchers has developed a faster and easier way to make sulfur-containing polymers that will lower the cost of large-scale production. The achievement, published in Nature Chemistry and Angewandte Chemie, opens the door to creating new products from this class of polymers while producing far less hazardous waste.

A type of semiconductor may be coming to a high-definition display near you. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown that a class of semiconductor called halide perovskites is capable of emitting multiple, bright colours from a single nanowire at resolutions as small as 500 nanometers.

Combining speed with incredible precision, a team of researchers has developed a way to print a nanoscale imaging probe onto the tip of a glass fibre as thin as a human hair, accelerating the production of the promising new device from several per month to several per day. The high-throughput fabrication technique opens the door for the widespread adoption of this and other nano-optical structures, which squeeze and manipulate light in ways ...

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars endured the hottest, most turbulent atmospheric entry ever attempted in a mission to the Red Planet. The saucer-shaped MSL was protected by a thin, lightweight carbon fibre-based heat-shield material that was a bit denser than balsa wood. The same material, dubbed PICA (Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator), also protected NASA's Stardust spacecraft as it ret...

  Sightings of a rare breed of superluminous supernovae—stellar explosions that shine 10 to 100 times brighter than normal—are perplexing astronomers. First spotted only in last decade, scientists are confounded by the extraordinary brightness of these events and their explosion mechanisms.

Glowing crystals designed to detect and capture heavy-metal toxins such as lead and mercury could prove to be a powerful tool in locating and cleaning up contaminated water sources. Motivated by publicised cases in which high levels of heavy metals were found in drinking water in Flint, Mich., and Newark, N.J., a science team led by researchers at Rutgers University used intense X-rays at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to probe the st...

Scientists have mapped the reorganisation of genetic material that takes place when a stem cell matures into a nerve cell. Detailed 3D visualisations show an unexpected connectivity in the genetic material in a cell's nucleus, and provide a new understanding of a cell's evolving architecture. These unique 3D reconstructions of mouse olfactory cells, which govern the sense of smell, were obtained using X-ray imaging tools ...

Next-generation solar cells made of super-thin films of semiconducting material hold promise because they're relatively inexpensive and flexible enough to be applied just about anywhere. Researchers are working to dramatically increase the efficiency at which thin-film solar cells convert sunlight to electricity. But it's a tough challenge, partly because a solar cell's subsurface realm—where much of the energy-conversion action happen...

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have for the first time created a single device that acts as both a laser and an anti-laser, and they demonstrated these two opposite functions at a frequency within the telecommunications band. Their findings, reported in a paper to be published in the journal Nature Photonics, lay the groundwork for developing a type of integrated device with the flexibility to ...

For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nm threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nm-gate transistors now on the market. Some laws are made to be broken, or at least challenged.

LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), a next-gen dark matter detector that will be at least 100 times more sensitive than its predecessor, has cleared another approval milestone and is on schedule to begin its deep-underground hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, in 2020. WIMPs are among the top prospects for explaining dark matter, the unseen stuff that we have observed only through gravitational effects.

Scientists have successfully paired ferroelectric and ferrimagnetic materials so that their alignment can be controlled with a small electric field at near room temperatures, an achievement that could open doors to ultra low-power microprocessors, storage devices and next-generation electronics. The work, co-led by researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Cornell University, is descri...

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have created a nanoscale display case that enables atomic-scale views of hard-to-study chemical and biological samples. Their work, published in the journal Science, could help reveal structural details for a range of challenging molecules - including complex chemical compounds and potentially new drugs - by stabilising them inside sturdy str...

Wind energy pricing remains attractive to utility and commercial purchasers, according to an annual report released by the US Department of Energy and prepared by the Electricity Markets and Policy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Prices offered by newly built wind projects are averaging around 2¢/kWh, driven lower by technology advancements and cost reductions.

A 3D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of millions of galaxies has received formal approval from the U.S. Department of Energy to move forward with construction. Installation of the project, called DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument), is set to begin next year at the Nicholas U. Mayall 4m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz., with observations starting up in January 2019.

The US Department of Energy announced today that it will invest $16m over the next four years to accelerate the design of new materials through use of supercomputers. Two four-year projects—one team led by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the other team led by DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—will leverage the labs’ expertise in materials and take advantage of superfast compu...