Berkeley Lab

10/19/2026

Could a routine blood test reveal radiation exposure? Berkeley Lab scientists developed a machine learning tool that uses data from complete blood count (CBC) results, potentially offering an accessible way to screen workers at risk without the hurdles of existing methods.

Using a routine blood draw, this machine learning model can detect radiation exposure to assess health risks.

10/13/2026

Congratulations to Berkeley Lab’s Samuel Williams, one of this year’s recipients of the U.S. Department of Energy’s prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award! Williams created transformative performance modeling tools and algorithms that help supercomputers run more efficiently.

One of Williams’s most widely recognized achievements is the creation of the Roofline Performance Model, a visual framework that helps developers easily identify hardware bottlenecks and optimize their code.

“Sam’s development of the Roofline model has been absolutely transformative. Before Roofline, developers often struggled to understand exactly why their applications weren’t performing as they expected,” said Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences' Jonathan Carter. “By providing a clear, visual map of hardware bottlenecks, his work has demystified complex constraints and empowers researchers to push the boundaries of what our supercomputers can achieve.”

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10/09/2026

How can science at the nanoscale make a difference in our everyday lives? At Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, researchers are exploring the building blocks of materials to better understand their properties and unlock new possibilities. A great reminder of why fundamental research matters. 🔬

10/08/2026

Today the DOE announced significant funding to scale up promising projects that use super intelligence (SI), commonly referred to as artificial intelligence, to accelerate discovery.

Berkeley Lab will lead the Multi-Office Accelerator Team Core Project (MOAT-Core), which applies SI to better design and run the particle accelerators that advance research in physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science. MOAT’s award grows the project to 16 collaborating institutions and will span multiple years.

As a prototype, MOAT showed that their SI “accelerator assistant,” Osprey, could adapt to work at different facilities and optimize how particle accelerators run.

In the next phase, MOAT-Core will deploy Osprey’s capabilities at additional accelerators across the DOE complex and expand the tool to connect to digital twins and assist in accelerator design. By applying all of the information the SI learns at real machines, researchers will be able to quickly run more accurate simulations, plan future experiments, and design the next generation of particle accelerators — a process that currently takes years of computations and testing.

“It’s a big software engineering task to develop a platform that works at multiple facilities, where there are different constraints and different instruments,” said Berkeley Lab’s Thorsten Hellert.

“Because accelerators are custom machines, sharing software is not the default in our community. But this project got us focused on building one thing together at a scale that has never happened before, and there are a lot of benefits from it. You can plug Osprey into a new facility and it works. I think Osprey will eventually be a platform that we use at dozens of facilities worldwide.”

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Advanced Light Source, U.S. Department of Energy

10/08/2026

Congratulations to Berkeley Lab’s new Early Career Research Program (ECRP) awardees Asmit Bhowmick, Marcus Noack, Dan Wang, and Bingqing Cheng!

Established in 2010 to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce, the ECRP program supports exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Recipients use the funding to pursue projects that have the potential to solve scientific challenges and advance the country’s STEM capabilities.

Learn more about the awardees and their projects.

Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences, Berkeley Lab Energy Technologies Area, Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy

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10/07/2026

Know a Scout who loves science? 🔬

Berkeley Lab is hosting the 14th annual Nuclear Science Day for Scouts on December 5! Scouts in 8th grade and above can explore nuclear science, and BSA Scouts can work toward earning their Nuclear Science merit badge.

Registration closes November 6. Help us spread the word to the next generation of scientists!

Learn more and register: https://hubs.ly/Q04yKdBf0

10/05/2026

From computer modeling to microbes, our scientists are developing the wide range of tools and technologies needed to extract critical minerals & materials from raw sources, waste streams, and recycled products. Learn more about our portfolio of research addressing the timely challenge of securing affordable and reliable domestic supply chains of the valuable elements needed to build consumer products, vehicles, medical devices, and energy and defense technologies.

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Molecular Foundry

10/01/2026

Every chip in your phone, laptop, and AI tools owes something to EUV lithography, a technique that prints circuits 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. It took decades of research at Berkeley Lab's Center for X-Ray Optics to make it commercially viable.

As CXRO Director Bruno La Fontaine put it: "CXRO will continue to play a vital role in helping push the boundaries of Moore's Law even further in the many years to come."

Basic science, real-world impact.

Advanced Light Source

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10/01/2026

Targeted alpha therapy is an emerging cancer treatment that uses alpha-emitting radioisotopes to target and destroy cancer cells without damaging nearby healthy cells.

The radioisotope actinium-225 shows promise for targeted alpha therapy, but the medical scanners available today lack the resolution and detection efficiency needed to accurately image actinium-225 and locate tumors.

To bridge this gap, Javier Caravaca, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division, has developed a new technique called Time-of-Flight Cascade Gamma Imaging (TOF-CGI). The advance could allow existing scanners to image targeted alpha therapy more accurately and enable its widespread adoption.

“TOF-CGI brings us a step closer to helping clinicians diagnose and treat cancer in a way that wasn’t possible before.” — Javier Caravaca, Berkeley Lab scientist

NERSC

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09/24/2026

The Advanced Light Source (ALS) has been working with NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration for over a decade to study a crucial, life-saving process: how spacecraft heat shields degrade under extreme conditions during atmospheric reentry.

This time, researchers reached even higher temperatures than ever before — using a custom sample environment found only at the ALS that independently controls temperature, pressure, and gas mixture to recreate real reentry conditions.

Using X-ray micro-computed tomography combined with AI-powered image enhancement, the team captured real-time, 3D views of two NASA heat shield materials as they broke down at 1,652°F — revealing striking structural differences that affect how each performs during reentry.

"Nearly every major NASA ablative heat shield material has been studied with this technique at the Advanced Light Source, including those relevant to the Artemis and Mars entry missions," said Vishnu Oruganti, an ALS user.

The findings are already helping engineers improve how they model and design thermal protection systems for missions like Artemis — bringing crews home safely.

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