The soil, microbes, air, and water surrounding every individual plant is actually a bustling miniature environment that can tell us a great deal about important, large-scale ecological processes. Our scientists have developed a ground-breaking new way to study it.
Researchers discovered how to use ion beams to create long strings of “color center” qubits in diamond. Creating large numbers of high-quality quantum bits (qubits), close enough for coupling to each other, is one of quantum computing’s great challenges. In the future, these strings could be created at facilities like the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center.
Tune in at noon on Friday, April 30, to learn more about Berkeley Lab’s Carbon Negative Initiative, which will address the basic science required to scale negative emissions technologies (NETs), develop analysis for integrating NETs, and ID the most promising directions for future NET research. Register for this Zoom presentation.
Plastics are ubiquitous, but they’re not practical. Less than 10% are recycled, and the other ~8 billion tons are creating a pollution crisis. A Berkeley Lab team is determined to change that. A new analysis shows producing and recycling their game-changing new plastic could be easy and cheap enough to leave old plastics in the dust.
In this Q&A, Berkeley Lab researcher Hanna Breunig explains techno-economic analysis and how she uses it to help make negative emissions technologies — which remove carbon dioxide from the air or other sources or enhance natural carbon sinks, such as forests and soil — more competitive and impactful.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have designed an enzyme-activated compostable plastic that could diminish microplastics pollution. Household tap water or soil composts break the hybrid plastic material down to small molecules, called monomers, in just a few days or weeks.
A new study by a team including researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley reports that the social cost of methane – a greenhouse gas that is 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its ability to trap heat – varies by as much as an order of magnitude between industrialized and developing regions of the world.



