After more than a year of repairs, the Large Hadron Collider located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland is back on track to create high-energy particle collisions that may yield extraordinary insights into the nature of the physical universe.

Berkeley Lab scientists, in cooperation with the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative, are releasing for beta testing a computer-based tool to help the world’s semiconductor manufacturing facilities evaluate and improve their energy efficiency.

By applying just the right compression to thin films of bismuth ferrite, Berkeley Lab researchers have produced a lead-free alternative to the current crop of piezoelectric materials.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been awarded $7 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for four projects that seek to advance Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS), which is capable of harnessing the Earth’s heat where conventional geothermal technologies cannot. The funding is part of a $400 million investment that the Department of Energy has made in geothermal energy thanks to the Recovery Act.

Apprentice electricians will join Berkeley Lab’s Facilities Division thanks to a historic agreement with the Alameda County Electrical Joint Apprenticeship and Training Committee, sponsored by Local 595 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Northern California chapter of the National Electrical Contractors Association.

As funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act start to flow into Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, much of that funding is flowing out to small businesses. To date, Berkeley Lab has been awarded more than $220 million in Recovery Act funds, a large part of which will go toward infrastructure projects and buying and upgrading computers and scientific equipment, such as microscopes, lasers and gene sequencers. So far, $38.2 million in Recovery Act subcontracts have been awarded, of which 58 percent went to small businesses.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed the world’s first acoustic hyperlens, a device that provides an eightfold boost in the magnification power of ultrasound, underwater sonar and other sound-based imaging technologies.

Berkeley researchers have devised a simple but powerful technique to induce nanoparticles to assemble themselves into complex arrays.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) released a new study on the installed costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the U.S., showing that the average cost of these systems declined by more than 30 percent from 1998 to 2008. Within the last year of this period, costs fell by more than 4 percent.

Scientists will examine cloud computing as a cost-effective and energy-efficient computing paradigm to accelerate discoveries in biology, climate change and physics. A program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the Department of Energy will examine cloud computing as a way to accelerate discoveries in a variety of disciplines.