Research lab
U.S. Department of Energy national lab in Berkeley, California, run by the University of California, researching physics and materials science.
Oxford-led researchers used SLAC's LCLS X-ray laser to follow AspH and IPNS step by step and made observations calculations had not predicted. In AspH an iron-bound water stayed stable through catalysis, and phys.org's account says such insights could inspire new therapeutics.
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NVIDIA committed $1 billion over five years and announced seven national-lab systems, led by Argonne's Solstice with around 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. Solstice targets AI work at 4 to 16 bits, so labs that need double precision are left weighing emulation against native FP64 hardware.
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Oxford researchers used X-ray lasers to film the enzyme IPNS building penicillin's beta-lactam ring, catching steps that last fractions of a second. Enzyme engineers now have a detailed starting point, but any benefit against resistant bacteria is further off.
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Astronomers spectroscopically confirmed 70 new gravitational lenses among candidates a neural network picked out of DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys images. Phys.org's report sets the search among projects built on 13 years of survey releases, so it vouches for the method more than for August's 5.6-trillion-pixel map.
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The EIA projects US electricity demand will set records in both 2026 and 2027, reaching 4,356 billion kWh. National growth is under 4% over the two years, so the power constraint on AI building shows up locally, in regional prices and in what a connected megawatt sells for.
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Local opposition stalled at least 45 US data center projects worth about $68 billion in the second quarter of 2026, Data Center Watch says. For developers, where a campus can be built is now a cost and schedule risk in its own right.
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NASA and Berkeley Lab researchers imaged heat-shield materials in 3D as they broke down at up to 900 degrees Celsius, using X-rays and a neural network. Engineers now have a record of how ablation starts, though their design simulations have yet to use it.
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Deep Isolation won a Texas Railroad Commission permit to drill a test borehole up to about 3 km deep near Austin, with Halliburton supplying drilling expertise. The trial uses no radioactive material and tests whether oilfield methods can build a disposal hole for spent fuel.
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New Jersey's utilities board warned power bills could rise up to 20% from June 1, with data centers a key driver. Utilities elsewhere are building the same demand into their pricing, so energy belongs among the costs an operator should expect to climb.
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Illinois and NASA researchers imaged two spacecraft ablators decomposing in 3D at up to 900 C, using X-ray tomography at Berkeley Lab. Modellers now have a real decomposition sequence to test against, though the heating stayed at least 750 C below reentry surface temperatures.
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The San Francisco startup wants drone fleets to thin clouds over solar farms. The uplift range comes from its own model, the first large flight is targeted for 2027, and standard FAA rules forbid the profile.
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UC Berkeley researchers say Mojave soil minerals adsorb CO2 at night and release it by day, moving 1 to 3 gigatons of carbon a year if scaled globally. Part of the soil exchange long credited to microbes may be physical, though the global figure rests on Mojave soils alone.
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A scanning tunneling microscope caught electrons inside molybdenum diselenide freezing into a crystal and melting into liquid-like waves, with the defect count in each sample deciding which state held. Quantum Monte Carlo simulations matched the images.
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CNBC reports both labs have sounded out powered sites of roughly 20 to 30MW in the UK, the Nordics and the US. A hall that small is usable because inference requests can be routed independently.
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A Berkeley Lab-led group spent years building a molybdenum diselenide device that a scanning tunneling microscope could read, and it says the defects in that device are what hold the electrons in place.
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An AP-NORC and University of Chicago poll puts concern about AI's environmental impact at 53%, up from 41% a year ago, with majorities worried about local electricity prices and water supply.
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The five-year survey covers about 75 percent of the sky and roughly 4 billion objects, and what shows it has landed as a product is the 1,800 papers already citing it.
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Berkeley Lab counts 2,061 GW still waiting for a grid connection, a tenth less than a year ago, but the pool shrank because developers abandoned the line faster than new ones joined it, and the arrivals were mostly gas.
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US data centres drew about 25GW in 2024, and BloombergNEF has them at 106GW by 2035. On that arithmetic, the question for anyone planning a cluster is when the megawatts arrive, not when the GPUs ship.
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If dark matter made the signal, the implied WIMP weighs at least 200 GeV, and LZ says its backgrounds there are very low. But the event came out of re-searching data already collected, so newer exposure has to settle it.
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Science · September 1, 2026 · Confirmed5 publishers