Berkeley Lab scientists Héctor García Martín, Jay Keasling, and Jill Banfield (whose primary affiliation is with the Earth & Environmental Sciences Area) were mentioned in an article by Amia Srinivasan entitled “What Termites Can Teach Us” published in The New Yorker. From the article: “In 2004 a team led by the Berkeley earth scientist Jill Banfield…
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Bill Gates’ $1 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures is investing in a host of startups developing technology that confront climate change. Among the first selected was Fervo Energy, a company hosted by EESA that is applying fracking techniques to the geothermal industry in the hope of converting far more of the planet’s latent heat into a source of…
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The EESA Mentoring Pilot Program for FY2018 kicked off with two training sessions on January 11 for individuals grouped in pairs of 43 mentors and mentees from our Area who will meet over the next nine months. Mentors learned effective mentoring skills in a morning training with breakout sessions. Mentees gathered in an afternoon training…
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Marin County’s San Geronimo Valley Planning Group is evaluating the watersheds that encompass the Lagunitas and San Geronimo Creeks, which drain into Tomales Bay and provide coho salmon habitat. Water pathogens have been detected in the watershed and Tomales Bay. Faulty on-site wastewater systems, especially for properties in close proximity to streams, have been identified as among the sources…
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Trevor Keenan and others' discovery suggest the rate at which CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere has plateaued in recent years because Earth’s vegetation is grabbing more carbon from the air than in previous decades.
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Jill Banfield's research team provides new clues about the roles of subsurface microbes in globally important cycles and adds new branches to the tree of life.
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Using the award-winning PhyloChip, a credit card-sized device that can detect the presence of more than 60,000 species of bacteria and archaea, a new method was found that was more sensitive than conventional methods at assessing health risks of microbially contaminated water.
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As part of the Obama Administration’s continued commitment to the President’s Climate Action Plan, the Department of Energy announced, on August 31st, $29 million in funding under the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) program for projects awarded to teams at Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) and the University of Utah. The funding will…
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The eight species of fungi on board, which are descended from microbes collected at Chernobyl, may one day lead the way to a “sunblock” that could protect human space travelers from the harmful radiation of space. The microbes were originally collected by Tamas Torok a scientist affiliated with the Climate and Ecosystems Sciences Division. “Some…
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Berkeley Lab will lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) to quantify how perturbations to mountainous watershed—floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt—impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. Researchers will observe and model watershed response to perturbations over seasonal to decadal timeframes, and from genome to watershed scales. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of…
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