In a quest to make concrete more durable and sustainable, an international team of geologists and engineers has found inspiration in the ancient Romans, whose massive concrete structures have withstood the elements for more than 2,000 years. The discovery could help improve the durability of modern concrete, which within 50 years often shows signs of… »
A group of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new microscale actuator which could find its application in novel microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles. The actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are based on an oxide material… »
A collaboration between U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) resulted with a project named Programming a Robot (PaR-PaR) – a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows easier robot training. PaR-PaR could provide the researchers with ways to train the liquid-handling robots with greater ease… »
A team consisting out of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California, Berkeley, has discovered a method to create artificial materials with desired properties by controlling the assembly of these complex structures. To achieve this effect, the researchers used bacteriophage as the building block which mimicked the ability of natural tissues… »
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have unveiled a semiconductor nanocrystal coating material capable to control the amount of solar heat while remaining transparent. The technology is the first to selectively control the amount of near infrared radiation and it is based on electrochromic materials (which use… »
A team of researchers, led by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), hopes to become the first in the world to produce electricity from the CO2 heated by energy under the surface of the Earth. The system could also be used to permanently store some of the CO2 underground, thus reducing its… »
The world’s first three-dimensional plasmon rulers, capable of measuring nanometer-scale spatial changes in macromolecular systems, have been developed by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Stuttgart. The 3D plasmon rulers could br uses to provide scientists with new details on dynamic events in biology… »
After writing about bird-protection glass and blast-resistant glass, here’s an article about glass which is stronger and tougher than steel. A new type of damage-tolerant metallic glass has been developed and tested by a collaboration of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the California Institute of… »
