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Physical and Life Sciences
LLNL receives accolades from EPA's Federal Green Challenge
LLNL has received accolades for its 2012 achievements in waste reduction and green purchasing as part of its participation in the Federal Green Challenge (FGC). The FGC is a voluntary partnership program sponsored by the EPA that challenges federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. FGC participants commit to a minimum 5 percent reduction in two of six…
LLNL scientist finds topography of Eastern Seaboard muddles ancient sea level changes
The distortion of the ancient shoreline and flooding surface of the U.S. Atlantic Coastal Plain are the direct result of fluctuations in topography in the region and could have implications on understanding long-term climate change, according to a new study.Sedimentary rocks from Virginia through Florida show marine flooding during the mid-Pliocene Epoch, which correlates…
Lawrence Livermore and Cool Earth Solar receive $1.7 million for renewable energy demonstration project
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has awarded $1.7 million to a partnership between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Cool Earth Solar Inc. (CES) to conduct a community-scale renewable energy integration demonstration project at the Livermore Valley Open Campus. CES is the prime awardee and is contributing an additional $1 million in matching funds to the CEC…
New LLNL research shows the moon's core was active later than original estimates
New evidence from ancient lunar rocks suggests that the moon's long-lived dynamo -- a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field -- lasted 160 million years longer than originally estimated and was continuously active until well after the final large impacts. Lawrence Livermore scientist William Cassata and a group of international…
Fiuza wins EPS Plasma Physics Ph.D. Research Award
Lawrence Fellow Frederico Fiuza is one of three recipients of this year's Ph.D. Research Award from the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS). Fiuza will receive his award during the 40th EPS plasma physics conference, held in Helsinki, Finland, July 1-5. Fiuza received the award for the work on his doctoral thesis, " Multi-scale PIC Simulations of…
Lawrence Livermore scientists discover new materials to capture methane
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UC Berkeley and have discovered new materials to capture methane, the second-highest concentration greenhouse gas emitted into Earth's atmosphere. Methane is a substantial driver of global climate change, contributing 30 percent of current net climate warming. Concern over methane is mounting, due to leaks…
LLNL and Berkeley scientists discover new materials to capture methane
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and UC Berkeley and have discovered new materials to capture methane, the second highest concentration greenhouse gas emitted into the atmosphere. Methane is a substantial driver of global climate change, contributing 30 percent of current net climate warming. Concern over methane is mounting, due to leaks…
The Lab's Bohlen sits on new panel to advise EPA on 'fracking'
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has formed an independent body to peer-review that agency's research on hydraulic fracturing. The Hydraulic Fracturing Research Advisory Panel, a group of 31 academics and experts, was created by EPA's Science Advisory Board (SAB) to review a congressionally ordered report looking at the potential health impacts of hydraulic…
Nine scientists named Distinguished Members of Technical Staff
Nine Laboratory scientists have joined the ranks of 14 other researchers by being named members of the Lab's Distinguished Members of Technical Staff (DMTS) for their extraordinary scientific and technical contributions to the Laboratory and its missions as acknowledged by their professional peers and the larger community. Maya Gokhale of the Computation Directorate, Ernst…
George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship now accepting applications
The fellowship named for pioneering Lawrence Livermore computational scientist George Michael is now accepting applications from exceptional PhD students whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers currently available. Recipients of the George Michael Memorial HPC…
Boron chemistry reported in Chemical Reviews
Livermore researchers have described in detail the properties of the room temperature form of the element boron.In the periodic table, boron occupies a peculiar, transitional position. It sits on the first row, and has metallic elements to its left, and non-metals to its right. Furthermore, it is the only non-metal in the third column of the periodic table.It is not…
LLNL scientists contributed to the latest Higgs Boson results announced by CERN
Laboratory scientists played a role in the latest results announced by CERN that provide further evidence that the subatomic particle discovered last year is the elusive Higgs boson, a particle at the heart of the Standard Model of particle physics. The new evidence resulted from the analysis of additional data from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron…
Water signature in distant planet shows clues to its formation, Lawrence Livermore research finds
A team of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed. "This is the sharpest spectrum ever obtained of an extrasolar planet…
First-ever determination of protein structure with X-ray laser
An international team of researchers, including LLNL physicist Matthias Frank and postdoc Mark Hunter, have for the first time used an ultra-intense X-ray laser to determine the previously unknown atomic-scale structure of a protein. The work was reported in the online edition of Science , which also featured the story as a News Flash. The team determined the structure of…
It's only natural: Lawrence Livermore helps find link to arsenic-contaminated groundwater
Human activities are not the primary cause of arsenic found in groundwater in Bangladesh. Instead, a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Barnard College, Columbia University, University of Dhaka, Desert Research Institute and University of Tennessee found that the arsenic in groundwater in the region is part of a natural process that predates…
NuSTAR helps solve riddle of black hole spin
An international team including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists has definitively measured the spin rate of a supermassive black hole for the first time. The findings, made by the two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, solve a long-standing debate about similar…
LLNL garners two top physics stories of 2012
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory garnered two top physics stories from the American Physical Society's list of the top physics newsmakers of 2012. In May 2012, the two most recently discovered elements were given names after the physics labs that discovered them. Number 114 is flerovium (Fl) after the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, and…
Retinal prosthesis LLNL helped develop is approved by the FDA
The U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday that its support for a decade of revolutionary research has contributed to the creation of the first ever retinal prosthesis -- or bionic eye -- to be approved in the United States by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for blind individuals with end-stage retinitis pigmentosa. LLNL engineers played a key role in the…
LLNL leads new initiative to improve lithium-ion batteries
A Lawrence Livermore team is working to improve lithium-ion battery performance, lifetime, and safety.Working with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the scientists are developing a new methodology for performing first-principles quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations at an unprecedented scale to understand key aspects of the chemistry and dynamics in…
Physicist Andris Dimits elected 2012 APS fellow
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Andris Dimits, a physicist in the Fusion Energy Sciences Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), has been selected as a 2012 American Physical Society (APS) fellow. Dimits was cited in the plasma physics category for "important insights and contributions to the theory and simulation of kinetic turbulent transport in magnetized plasmas…
