Berkeley Lab researchers may have opened the door to a simpler approach for the fabrication of plasmonic materials – one of the hottest new fields in high tech – by inducing polyhedral-shaped silver nanocrystals to self-assemble into three-dimensional millimeter-sized supercrystals of the highest possible density.

Introducing a special corn gene into switchgrass was found to significantly boost the viability of the switchgrass biomass as a feedstock crop for advanced biofuels. The gene, a variant of the Corngrass1 gene, holds the switchgrass in a perpetual juvenile state, more than doubling its starch content and making it easier to convert its polysaccharides into fermentable sugars.

Susan Murabana is working to bring astronomy education to Africa through Global Hands-On Universe, a program founded by Berkeley Lab astronomer Carl Pennypacker.

Theoretical research by Berkeley Lab scientists has led to record-breaking efficiencies in solar cells. The research showed that, contrary to conventional scientific wisdom, the key to solar cell efficiency is not absorbing more photons but emitting more photons.

A recent Journal of Climate paper by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and John Ten Hoeve (2011) on urban heat islands and cool roofs is a useful contribution to the literature. However, their results regarding white roofs are preliminary and uncertain. Along with work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, other published papers have addressed the broader benefits of white roofs. These studies taken together raise important issues that need to be considered from a policy standpoint to fully understand the potential of more reflective (white or cool) surfaces.

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed up this process, a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) teamed up to develop a new tool, called the Materials Project, which launches this month.

The quest to reduce carbon emissions is coming to Big Sky country. Berkeley Lab scientists are part of an effort to determine whether a large fraction of Montana’s and nearby states’ CO2 emissions can be stored deep underground — where it can’t contribute to climate change. The project will require extensive modeling, monitoring and lab analyses, which is where Berkeley Lab’s expertise comes in.

Fuel cells seem like an ideal energy source—they’re clean, efficient, silent and don’t require transmission lines. The hitch? They can be costly. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hope to change that equation by building a sophisticated cost model that will take into account the total cost of ownership.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a wide variety of clean energy technologies—from biofuels to batteries to solar energy—but now these disparate efforts are being tied together with an in-depth and innovative analytical approach that will show which technologies are the most beneficial to pursue. The analysis will also give feedback to scientists before a technology hits the marketplace, allowing them to adjust and refine the technology so as to maximize its economic and environmental impact.

By embedding fixed arrays of gold nanoparticles into fluid lipid bilayers, Berkeley Lab scientists can study with unprecedented detail how the spatial patterns of chemical and physical properties on membranes can determine the fate of a cell – whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous.