Science Vignettes
How California Wildfires Can Impact Water Availability
Berkeley Lab researchers used NERSC supercomputers to show that conditions left behind by California wildfires lead to greater winter snowpack, greater summer water runoff and increased groundwater storage. Read More »
Predicting Plasma Pressure in Future Fusion Facilities
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed new insights into the physics governing the balance of pressure in the scrape-off layer of fusion reactors. Read More »
Hydrogen a Culprit in Battery Degredation
UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues, using NERSC, have uncovered a reason for the loss of capacity that occurs over time in sodium batteries: the unintended presence of hydrogen, which leads to degradation of the battery electrode. Read More »
An Integral Role for Gluons in the Proton's Pressure Distribution
For the first time, lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations run at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) allowed nuclear physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to determine the pressure distribution inside a proton, including the individual contributions of the proton’s fundamental particles: quarks and gluons. This discovery brings nuclear scientists closer to a complete understanding of a proton’s structure and the fundamental particles that make up most of the visible matter in the universe. Read More »
New Insights Into the Human Gut Microbiome
Scientists at the DOE Joint Genome Institute computationally reconstructed 60,664 microbial genomes from 3,810 human gut metagenomes from geographically and phenotypically diverse human subjects. These genomes represent 2,058 previously unknown species, thereby bringing the number of known human gut species to 4,558 and increasing the phylogenetic diversity of sequenced gut bacteria by 50 percent. Read More »
