Energy costs K-12 schools in the U.S. $6 billion dollars annually. Spending less money on energy costs would leave more for funding-constrained school districts to spend on educating their students, according to researchers at Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD). They have released a guide on planning and financing comprehensive energy upgrades that involve multiple measures and are targeted toward achieving significant and persistent energy savings.

Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

The Planck collaboration has released its first cosmological results, based on trillions of measurements of the cosmic microwave background. The results owe much to Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), including tens of millions of hours of massively parallel processing, plus the expertise of physicists and computational scientists in the Computational Cosmology Center (C3) who generated a quarter of a million simulated maps of the Planck sky, essential to the analysis.

Electrons flowing swiftly across the surface of topological insulators (TIs) are “spin polarized,” their spin and momentum locked. This new way to control electron distribution in spintronic devices makes TIs a hot topic in materials science. Now Berkeley Lab scientists have discovered more surprises: contrary to assumptions, the spin polarization of photoemitted electrons from a topological insulator is wholly determined in three dimensions by the polarization of the incident light beam.

Seventy years ago theorists predicted superlarge nuclei would exhibit a quantum-mechanical phenomenon known as “atomic collapse.” Recently materials scientists calculated that highly-charged impurities in graphene should exhibit a corresponding state, a buildup of electrons partially localized in space and energy constituting a unique electronic resonance. By constructing artificial superlarge nuclei on graphene, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have achieved the first experimental observation of the long-sought state, with important implications for the future of graphene-based electronic devices.

Berkeley Lab researchers have achieved a major advance in understanding how genetic information is transcribed from DNA to RNA by providing the first step-by-step look at the biomolecular machinery that reads the human genome.

Artificial photosynthesis and other new technologies based on
metalloenzyme catalysis will benefit from a technique for simultaneously collecting both diffraction and spectroscopy data demonstrated by Berkeley Lab and SLAC researchers at the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

The protein structure of the archaellum, the motor that propels many species of Archaea, the third domain of life, has been characterized for the first time by a team from Berkeley Lab and the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology. A ring made of six identical proteins derives energy from hydrolyzing adenosine triphosate (ATP) and uses this energy to drive shape changes, both assembling and rotating the archaellum’s whiplike propeller.

New details into the activation of a cell surface protein that has been strongly linked to a large number of cancers and is a major target of cancer therapies have been reported by Berkeley Lab researchers.

Designing a building holistically, and making sure that its components and systems work together according to design intent, can pay big dividends in energy savings and occupant satisfaction, according to a study of The New York Times Building by Berkeley Laboratory. A Berkeley Lab research team began working with the Times Company in 2003 to design, evaluate and specify an integrated solution with energy-efficient lighting and automated shading systems for the windows in a full-scale mockup at a nearby Times Company site in Queens.