Even as the “supernova of a generation” came into view in backyards across the northern hemisphere last August, physicists and astronomers who had caught its earliest moments were developing a surprising and much clearer picture of what happens during a titanic Type Ia explosion. Now they have announced the closest, most detailed look ever at one of the universe’s brightest “standard candles,” the celestial mileposts that led to the discovery of dark energy.

A team of researchers that includes Berkeley Lab scientists are using state-of-the-art methods in data mining and high-performance computing to quantify extreme weather phenomena in the very large datasets generated by today’s climate models. Their work will help scientists predict how climate change impact the frequency of extreme weather events.

While the worst drought since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s grips Oklahoma and Texas, scientists are warning that what we consider severe drought conditions in North America today may be normal for the continent by the mid-21st century, due to a warming planet. A team of scientists from Berkeley Lab and elsewhere came to this conclusion after analyzing 19 different state-of-the-art climate models.

A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away — than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley who made the discovery predict that it will be a target for research for the next decade, making it one of the most-studied supernova in history.

Berkeley Lab researchers led the development of a technique called HARPES, for Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, that enables the study of electronic structures deep below material surfaces, including the buried layers and interfaces in nanoscale devices. This could pave the way for smaller logic elements in electronics, novel memory architectures in spintronics, and more efficient energy conversion in photovoltaic cells.

Berkeley Lab today announced a major step toward creating one of the world’s fastest scientific networks to accelerate research in fields ranging from advanced energy solutions to particle physics. Known as the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI), the effort represents a $62 million multi-year investment by the DOE Office of Science in next-generation networking technology.

Kazakhstan is a nation rich in energy resources but plagued by a history of exploitation and a legacy of environmental disasters. With an eye to a diverse economy, sustainable growth, and responsible environmental stewardship, the newly opened Nazarbayev University is establishing a national Center for Energy Research, with guidance from a diverse team of Berkeley Lab scientists.

When the universe was only millionths of a second old, quarks moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons, but soon protons and neutrons and other forms of ordinary matter “froze out” of this quark-matter soup. Now scientists have compared quantum theory and data from the STAR experiment for the first time to map out the energies and temperatures where ordinary matter melts and the quark-gluon plasma freezes.

A team of researchers led by James Vary, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, first predicted the properties of fluorine-14 with the help of scientists in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Research Division, as well as supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

Berkeley Lab researchers have fabricated superlenses from perovskite oxides that are ideal for capturing light in the mid-infrared range, opening the door to highly sensitive biomedical detection and imaging. It may also be possible to turn the superlensing effect on/off, opening the door to highly dense data writing and storage.