Pr Press Articles, Journals and News
The Salton Sea geothermal field in California potentially holds enough lithium to meet all of America’s domestic battery needs, with even enough left over to export some of it. But how much of that lithium can be extracted in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way? And how long will the resource last? These are just a few of the questions that researchers hope to answer in a new project sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
An international research team that includes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists has established a new upper limit of 0.8 electron volts (eV) for the mass of the neutrino, a milestone that will bear on future discoveries in nuclear and particle physics, and cosmology.
Reiner Kruecken, a nuclear physicist and Deputy Director for Research at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator center, has been selected to serve as the next Division Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Nuclear Science Division. His appointment will be effective in May. The announcement follows an international search.
A research team led by Berkeley Lab has demonstrated an optical material that self-assembles from tiny concentric nanocircles. Their work could enable the large-scale manufacturing of nanocomposites for fiberoptic telecommunications systems as well as for buildings, automobiles, and aerospace.
Three staff researchers and one affiliate have been elected into the 2021 class of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
As the name implies, crystallography requires crystals – specifically, purified samples of the molecule of interest, coaxed into a crystal form. But most molecules form powders composed of jumbled granules, not picture-ready crystals. A new computer algorithm, combined with a state-of-the-art laser, can adapt X-ray crystallography for the many not-so-neat-and-tidy compounds that scientists seek to study.
Geoscientists from Berkeley Lab and two other DOE National Laboratories, Sandia and Los Alamos, are collaborating on the HotBENT project. This international field experiment is evaluating how well the natural, clay-based material (bentonite) placed around canisters of buried, high-level nuclear waste retains its safety functions when exposed to simulated long-term heating.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has capped off the first seven months of its survey run by smashing through all previous records for three-dimensional galaxy surveys, creating the largest and most detailed map of the universe ever.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have discovered how to directly measure the unique magnetic properties of superthin graphene nanoribbons. The breakthrough could lead to high-speed, low-power nanoscale data storage technologies.
Dealing with our climate crisis continues to be top of mind, although batteries, magnets, and exotic elements also captured the imagination.
