News Releases

New Berkeley Lab breakthroughs: engineering chemical-producing microbes; watching enzyme reactions in real time; capturing the first image of ‘electron ice’; revealing how skyrmions really move

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have developed a cheap and efficient way to produce pure titanium metal. Their approach is scalable for commercial production, and produces an easily recycled product.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new technique that allows researchers to synthesize a perovskite solar material, characterize its crystal structure, and test its response to light at the same time.

Having good room ventilation to dilute and disperse indoor air pollutants has long been recognized, and with the COVID-19 pandemic its importance has become all the more heightened. But new experiments by Berkeley Lab indoor air researchers show that certain circumstances will result in poor mixing of room air, meaning airborne contaminants may not be effectively dispersed and removed by building level ventilation.

The cold polar oceans give rise to some of the largest food webs on Earth. And at their base are microscopic, photosynthetic algae. But human-induced climate change, a new study suggests, is displacing these important cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones, a trend that threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web and change the oceans as we know them.

Scientists have reported new clues to solving a cosmic conundrum: How the quark-gluon plasma – nature’s perfect fluid – evolved into the building blocks of matter during the birth of the early universe.

An experiment to study gravity at the quantum scale, insights into an antibiotic-building enzyme, and the backstory of an incredible new protein prediction algorithm are featured in this month's roundup of science highlights.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley will be home to a cutting-edge quantum network testbed, following a new five-year, $12.5 million funding award from the U.S. Department of Energy.

A team led by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley has demonstrated an approach for achieving LEDs with near 100% light-emission efficiency at all brightness levels.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have taken the clearest picture yet of electronic particles that make up a mysterious magnetic state called quantum spin liquid (QSL). The achievement could facilitate the development of superfast quantum computers and energy-efficient superconductors. The scientists are the first to capture an image of how electrons in a QSL decompose into spin-like particles called spinons and charge-like particles called chargons.