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Figure: The “shadow effect” observed in a graphite electrode after fast (1 hour) intercalation to a state of charge (SOC) of 100%. Lithium plating on the graphite is shown in turquoise and the black region underneath shows where the SOC is less than 30%. Image courtesy Balsara Lab.

Professors Kristie Boering and Whendee Silver. Photos courtesy UC Berkeley.

Jay Keasling, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), professor at UC Berkeley, and CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), has been named a Distinguished Scientist Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Liliana Rojas is a first-year student majoring in chemical engineering at UC Berkeley. (Photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)

Atom Computing announced its first-generation 100-atom quantum computer on July 21, 2021. (Image courtesty Atom Computing.)

Alumna Linda G. Griffith is a professor of biological and mechanical engineering at M.I.T., and its director of the Center for Gynepathology Research. “I don’t want to make endometriosis a women’s issue,” she said in 2014. “I want to make it an M.I.T. issue.” Photo credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times.

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Scientists at Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley design 3D-grown material that could speed up production of new technologies for smart buildings and robotics. STEM tomography image of a 3D-grown 100-200-nanometer crystalline disc. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

Markita Landry, Asst. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, has been named a 2021 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. This award recognizes faculty within the first five years of their academic careers, who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship, and are deeply committed to education.

With moderate heat, enzyme-laced films of the plastic disintegrated in standard compost or plain tap water within days to weeks, Ting Xu and her colleagues

“Biodegradability does not equal compostability,” says Xu, a polymer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She often finds bits of biodegradable plastic in the compost she picks up for her parents’ garden. Most biodegradable plastics go to landfills, where the conditions aren’t right for them to break down, so they degrade no faster than normal plastics.

Only about 2% of plastics are fully recycled currently. PDK plastics could solve the single-use crisis. (Chanchai Phetdikhai/Shutterstock)

A modified plastic (left) breaks down after just three days in standard compost (right) and entirely after two weeks. (UC Berkeley photo by Ting Xu)