A team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab has observed chirality for the first time in polar skyrmions in a material with reversible electrical properties – a combination that could lead to more powerful data storage devices that continue to hold information, even after they’ve been turned off.

Researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division are applying deep learning and analytics to electronic health record (EHR) data to help the Veterans Administration address a host of medical and psychological challenges affecting many of the nation’s 700,000 military veterans.

A simple method developed by a Berkeley Lab-led team could turn ordinary semiconducting materials into quantum machines – superthin devices with extraordinary electronic behavior. Such an advancement could help to revolutionize a number of industries aiming for energy-efficient electronic systems – and provide a platform for exotic new physics.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have turned parts of a 13,000-mile-long testbed of “dark fiber,” unused fiber-optic cable, owned by the DOE Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) into a highly sensitive seismic activity sensor that could potentially augment the performance of earthquake early warning systems currently being developed in the western United States.

New simulations led by researchers working at the Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley combine decades-old theories to provide new insight about the driving mechanisms in plasma jets that allow them to steal energy from black holes’ powerful gravitational fields and propel it far from their gaping mouths.

Four college teams – UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Cal State University San Bernardino, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University – will square off at Berkeley Lab on Dec. 1 as part of DOE’s fourth collegiate CyberForce Competition. The event aims to address the cybersecurity capability gap and increase awareness around energy critical infrastructure.

Four Berkeley Lab scientists – Allen Goldstein, Sung-Hou Kim, Susannah Tringe, and Katherine Yelick – have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. They are among the 416 scientists awarded the distinction of AAAS Fellow this year.

A team of computational scientists and engineers from Berkeley Lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and NVIDIA has been awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for applying an exascale-class deep learning application to extreme climate data and breaking the exaop (1 billion billion calculations) computing barrier for the first time with a deep learning application.

New supercomputer simulations by climate scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have shown that climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria by 5 to 10 percent. They further found that if those hurricanes were to occur in a future world that is warmer than present, those storms would have even more rainfall and stronger winds.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab has signed a $146 million contract with Cray for the facility’s next-generation supercomputer, a pre-exascale machine slated to be delivered in 2020. Named “Perlmutter” in honor of Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, it is the first NERSC system specifically designed to meet the needs of large-scale simulations as well as data analysis from experimental and observational facilities.