Nuclear chemist Darleane Hoffman and surface chemist Gabor Somorjai received the Enrico Fermi Award from President Biden and Vice-President Harris for their pioneering work. Photos courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
The Biden Administration today (Tuesday, March 28) named Darleane C. Hoffman...
Berkeley Lab scientists Leticia Arnedo-Sanchez (from left), Katherine Shield, Korey Carter, and Jennifer Wacker had to take precautions against radioactivity as well as coronavirus to conduct experiments with the rare element, einsteinium. (Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab)
Since element 99 – einsteinium – was discovered in 1952 at...
Elements on the periodic table that make up the lanthanides, or rare-earth heavy elements.
Lanthanides are rare-earth heavy metals with useful magnetic properties and a knack for emitting light. Researchers had long assumed that lanthanides’ toxicity risk was low and therefore safe to implement in a number of high-tech breakthroughs we now take for...
Urey at his desk, photograph, circa late 1940s (Northwest Indiana Times)
Missoula first noticed Harold Urey in May of 1915, when the University of Montana announced the winners of the annual C.A. Duniway Scholarship Books. Urey, a 22-year-old freshman from Indiana by way of a mining camp in the Gallatin Mountains, received the biology award....
Scientists at Berkeley Lab’s predecessor, the UC Radiation Laboratory, discovered berkelium in 1949, and californium in 1950. Today, Berkeley Lab scientists are using state-of-the-art instruments at the Molecular Foundry to better understand how actinides like berkelium and californium could serve to accelerate...
In 2017, radiochemistry graduate student Mark Straub left the comfortable academic environs of UC Berkeley and moved to the middle of New Mexico, where he spent his summer working full time at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the birthplace of the Manhattan Project. There, Mark teamed up with LANL scientists ...
Research authors Katherine Shield (from left), Dahlia An, and Tyler Bailey (lead author) are part of a research team that developed new methods for the large-scale production, purification, and use of the radioisotope cerium-134, which...
Workers load uranium slugs into the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge in 1943. Image: Ed Westcott/US Army/Manhattan Engineer District.
On July 16 this year, on what marks the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test, a patient may go to the doctor for a heart scan. A student may open her...
As we push the Periodic Table of the Elements further and further into the unknown, its familiar columns and rows are threatening to crumble. What’s next for this science icon? Superheavy elements exist for a fraction of time and are nearly impossible to catch. But understanding them could force us to reimagine the most iconic scientific symbol of all time..
Eric Seaborg, a writer and author, outdoorsman and environmentalist, has a love for hiking that he shared with his father, the late chemist and Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999) who blazed trails in element and isotope discoveries during an illustrious career at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley.
Eric Seaborg, a writer and author, outdoorsman and environmentalist, has a love for hiking that he shared with his father, the late chemist and Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999) who blazed trails in element and isotope discoveries during an illustrious career at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley.