An international collaboration of scientists led by Omar Yaghi, a renowned chemist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has developed a technique they dubbed “gas adsorption crystallography” that provides a new way to study the process by which metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) – 3D crystals with extraordinarily large internal surface areas – are able to store immense volumes of gases such a carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane. This new look at MOFs led to a discovery that holds promise for the improved design of MOFs tailored specifically for carbon capture, or...
Solar cells made from an inexpensive and increasingly popular material called perovskite can more efficiently turn sunlight into electricity using a new technique to sandwich two types of perovskite into a single photovoltaic cell.
Perovskite solar cells are made of a mix of organic molecules and inorganic elements that together capture light and convert it into electricity, just like today’s more common silicon-based solar cells. Perovskite photovoltaic devices, however, can be made more easily and cheaply than silicon and on a flexible rather than rigid substrate. The first...
Microbes are essential to life on Earth. They’re found in soil and water and inside the human gut. In fact, nearly every habitat and organism hosts a community of microbes, called a microbiome. What’s more, microbes hold tremendous promise for innovations in medicine, energy, agriculture, and understanding climate change.
Scientists have made great strides learning the functions of many microbes and microbiomes, but this research also highlights how much more there is to know about the connections between Earth’s microorganisms and a vast number of processes. Deciphering how...
An important step towards next-generation ultra-compact photonic and optoelectronic devices has been taken with the realization of a two-dimensional excitonic laser. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) embedded a monolayer of tungsten disulfide into a special microdisk resonator to achieve bright excitonic lasing at visible light wavelengths.
“Our observation of high-quality excitonic lasing from a single molecular layer of tungsten disulfide marks a major step towards two-dimensional on-chip optoelectronics for...
A newly established neuroscience research institute based at UC San Francisco will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of plasticity, the brain’s remarkable capacity to modify its own structure and function. To accomplish its goals, the newly established Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience (Kavli IFN), a partnership of The Kavli Foundation and UCSF, will forge new collaborations among neuroscientists, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists to...
Peidong Yang, a UC Berkeley chemist who is trying to capture carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into a sustainable transportation fuel, has been named a MacArthur “genius” Fellow.
Peidong Yang is an inorganic chemist opening new horizons for tackling the global challenge of clean, renewable energy sources through transformative advances in the science of semiconductor nanowires and nanowire photonics.
The MacArthur Foundation announced its 24 new 2015 fellows early Tuesday, Sept. 29, all of whom will receive $625,000 to use in any way they wish.
To the growing list of two-dimensional semiconductors, such as graphene, boron nitride, and molybdenum disulfide, whose unique electronic properties make them potential successors to silicon in future devices, you can now add hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites. However, unlike the other contenders, which are covalent semiconductors, these 2D hybrid perovskites are ionic materials, which gives them special properties of their own.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have successfully grown atomically thin 2D...
Members of the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) convened at a town hall on Sept. 15 to learn who will lead its two new divisions. Before the announcements, Berkeley Lab director Paul Alivisatos said that EESA is well positioned to address many critical national and global scientific needs. He also said that EESA’s science is deeply integrated with other Lab areas, such as computing and biosciences. After Director Alivisatos spoke, EESA Associate Laboratory Director Susan Hubbard named Jens Birkholzer director of the Energy Geosciences Division, and Bill Collins director...
Berkeley Lab’s Peidong Yang was part of an online Kavli Institute discussion on using the sun to create natural gas, which can be stored and distributed through existing systems and emit no a single molecule of CO2. Yang led a team that recently achieved synthetic photosynthesis by marrying nanoscience and biology. More>
Nanoscale defects are enormously important in shaping the electrical, optical, and mechanical properties of a material. For example, a defect may donate charge or scatter electrons moving from one point to another. However, observing individual defects in bulk insulators, a ubiquitous and essential component to almost all devices, has remained elusive: it’s far easier to image the detailed electrical structure of conductors than insulators.
Now, Berkeley Lab researchers have demonstrated a new method that can be applied to study individual defects in a widely used bulk insulating...