With its access to the best and brightest, Berkeley Lab is not only home to Nobel Prize winners, but also a place where today’s new discovery can become the next renewable energy start-up.

A Better Battery Niche

Nitash Balsara

Nitash Balsara, a materials scientist at Berkeley [...]]]> Science Today, Start-up Tomorrow

With its access to the best and brightest, Berkeley Lab is not only home to Nobel Prize winners, but also a place where today’s new discovery can become the next renewable energy start-up.

A Better Battery Niche

Nitash Balsara

Nitash Balsara, a materials scientist at Berkeley Lab, invented a unique solid-state lithium-ion battery for cars and laptops that has a higher energy density, can be operated in extreme temperatures, and is safer than conventional lithium-ion batteries. (Remember Apple’s iBook/Powerbook battery recall in the mid-2000s? Those liquid-filled lithium ion batteries posed a fire hazard due to their tendency to overheat.)

Balsara could’ve licensed his solid-state lithium-ion battery to an outside company, but he didn’t. Why not? (In determining what type of company is most likely to be successful as a licensee of Lab technology, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Management, the group responsible for licensing all LBNL technology and software, weighs many trade-offs.  A start-up company can be a good fit for a technology that is revolutionary and may be many years from reaching the market as the start-up will have more invested in sticking with the technology through the long development process.)

“I was afraid that companies would take the invention and if the battery failed, they would give up. To take this invention further I had to take the time to invest in it and prove that this invention could work,” he told me.

He also proved that good things happen when you marry science with business savvy. In 2007, Balsara, his postdoc Mohit Singh (now Seeo Vice President for R&D) and graduate student Hany Eitouni  (now Vice President of Advanced Materials at Seeo) founded battery start-up Seeo with initial funding from Khosla Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Last year, Seeo, now located in Hayward, Calif., set up a pilot production line that can produce batteries having a capacity of 4 million watt-hours per year (a typical laptop battery carries 30 watt-hours of energy). Since achieving this important first step towards commercialization, they have raised close to $40 million — $11 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) along with private investments from Google and GSR Ventures. Seeo will use the DOE funds to develop and test battery packs for DOE’s Smart Grid and Energy Storage demonstration programs.

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Bridging the Gap Between Energy Research and Industry

Even if a breakthrough technology doesn’t lead to a new company today, it doesn’t mean it won’t in the years to come. That’s why DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) set up its high-risk/high-reward programs “to substantially reduce foreign energy imports; cut energy-related greenhouse gas emissions; and improve efficiency across the energy spectrum.” And ARPA-E is betting the not-for-profit research that some in the private sector shy away from will result in industrial innovation and a boost in American jobs.

Berkeley Lab researchers Christer Jansson (left), Steve Singer (center left) and David Watson (right), along with Carbon Cycle 2.0 Coordinator Melissa Summers (center right), on Capitol Hill recently to describe their research to members of Congress and their staff.

In 2010, ARPA-E requested proposals for electrofuels — a type of biofuel produced by bacteria that can use renewable electricity from solar, wind, or wave power combined with CO₂ to produce liquid fuel for cars, trucks, and jets. Steve Singer, the Director of Microbial Communities at the Berkeley Lab-led Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and his team won more than $3 million from ARPA-E to develop an industrial-scale Integrated Microbial Electrocatalytic (MEC) System for liquid biofuel production from CO₂. This isn’t easy money to be had. Singer’s system — powered by Ralstonia eutropha, a common soil bacteria — has to produce 100 mg/L of hydrocarbon biofuel by 2013, or else DOE takes its money back.

Bacteria-produced biofuels may be the answer to the potential ecological and agricultural cost of those made from corn or switchgrass. “Elecrofuels give us a new way of finding compounds that’s not dependent on agricultural resources. We are not driving up the cost of corn, not taking up land that could be used for food production, and we can use energy from wind or photovoltaics,” Singer explained.

Photo: DOE/ARPA-E

Singer and his team — Harry Beller, Nathan Hillson and Swapnil Chhabra from Berkeley Lab, Chris Chang from the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, and Dan MacEachran of Logos Technologies in Virginia — are entering the third and final year of their ARPA-E challenge. They’re so close to achieving the 100 mg/L milestone that they’ve upped the ante to 1 g/L of hydrocarbon biofuel from electricity and CO₂.

If you’re thinking of applying for an ARPA-E grant next year, Singer advises you to think in terms of milestones, and to mix scientific ambition with practical business sense. “You need intermediary goals and a mix of something practical and really novel. Something you can start a company with but can change science in 20 years.”

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For a more detailed look at Singer’s work, go here.

Crediting biologist and open-access supporter Jonathan Eisen, a DOE JGI affiliate who was [...]]]> Addressing an audience composed primarily of scientists and bioinformaticists at the DOE Joint Genome Institute’s (JGI) 7^th Genomics of Energy and Environment Meeting, New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer brought up a slide with the words “YAGS – Yet Another Genome Syndrome.”

Crediting biologist and open-access supporter Jonathan Eisen, a DOE JGI affiliate who was in the audience during that March 20, 2012 keynote address, with the term, he said YAGS is marked by the deluge of genome announcements in the news, with very little detail as to why these projects matter.

There’s an impression, he said, that “the sequence of a particular genome in addition to being a huge accomplishment, which it is, is also a game-changing, headline-making story.”

Unsurprisingly, there were questions afterward from the audience, and the first one came from DOE JGI Eukaryote Super Program head Dan Rokhsar, who asked if YAGS should be blamed on researchers like himself and others involved in genome sequencing, or on members of the media, public information officers included, who are not successful at communicating the importance of this work. (Spoiler alert: Jon Weiner wrote previously about the challenges of PIOs serving as translators between scientists and everyone else, so this piece focuses on how scientists communicate their own science.)

A bit of both, said Zimmer, a self-diagnosed YAGS sufferer since 2010. “My point is there are too many stories about the next genome. Science is that funny business where it’s hard to tell if maybe some genomes shouldn’t be written about.” He also talked about the importance of basic communication skills for scientists. “Scientists are not simply robots in a lab but part of a society and need to share insights,” he added.

Is that the sound of a gauntlet being cast onto the ground? All right, Mr. Zimmer, game on.

Zimmer’s talk set the tone for the next two days of this annual meeting and several speakers, both onstage and at the poster sessions, took up his challenge of effectively communicating their work. There were several impromptu elevator pitches as scientists worked their name, their job description, how their work matters to the general public, and a reference to Carl Zimmer into 15-second sound bites. There were anecdotes involving the relationship between dinosaurs and fungi, a seed development animation set to music, and even an analogy involving gold, Boeing 747s, and a weed killer.

One poster presenter at the meeting who arguably had less trouble with communicating his work was Craig Cary of New Zealand’s University of Waikato, who talked about using mummified seal carcasses to help researchers study climate change in Antarctica.

Craig Cary discusses his work involving mummified seal carcasses.

Anyone who starts his Methods and Materials section with, “We moved a 275-year old mummified seal carcass 50 meters east and then took soil samples under the carcass over the next five years…” should not be surprised to find an attentive audience whose imagination has been captured by that image. (His poster also included photos of his team moving the 200+ pound seal mummy; apparently a television crew was filming them.)

In this climate of striving toward effective science communication, a short video featuring DOE JGI Metagenome Program Lead Susannah Tringe debuted on the second day of the meeting. The video focuses on her DOE Early Career Research Award project to study the contributions of microbial communities in the restored wetlands of the San Joaquin Delta to the carbon cycle.

Remember that gauntlet Zimmer hurled during the first day of the meeting? Biochemist Steven Benner from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution picked it up and tossed it back during his closing keynote speech. He started to refute the “antigenome sentiment in biology” by explaining the difference between the scientist’s perspective and the public’s perspective.

Unlike Zimmer and his colleagues, he said, scientists aren’t trained to find that hook to get the public’s attention or to speculate on possible benefits. “Look at genome sequencing from the chemistry perspective,” he added. “German chemists of the 19^th century did the chemistry of natural biostructures very well without knowing there would be a sequenced human genome.”

More importantly, Benner also argued that to understand the importance of the plethora of genome sequences, they should be considered from the perspective of planetary biology. Don’t look at how long it is taking for the human genome project to realize the promise of personalized medicine, he said. Rather, look at the bigger picture and consider that human and global histories can be read in the genomes of various species, from dating the first beer ever brewed to charting evidence of climate change. In succeeding slides he then tracked the emergence of genes involved in fermentation in the yeast genome, correlated the data to the genes involved in alcohol tolerance in humans, and so on.

“There are not that many sequences completed to planetary biology level yet,” Benner admitted in closing. “But planetary analysis will indeed revolutionize biology.”

Until that day comes, scientists and science communicators will have to work together to keep people reaching for the stars.

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Written By: Massie Ballon

Communicating science, and why it’s so important, was one of many topics at a melding of scientists and communicators [...]]]> There’s a classic New Yorker cartoon by James Stevenson showing two professorial-looking gentlemen sitting in their cluttered office lounge chairs. One says to the other, “One thing I’ll say for us, Meyer—we never stooped to popularizing science.”

Communicating science, and why it’s so important, was one of many topics at a melding of scientists and communicators that took place recently in Vancouver, British Columbia. The meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is one of the largest general scientific gatherings of its kind…covering everything from astronomy and biology to climate science, medicine, and more. It’s also a meeting draws a large number of news media.

My primary goal for going this year was to support presentations by several Berkeley Lab researchers, including Carolyn Larabell, who showed how soft x-ray tomography can see inside individual cells; Daniel Fletcher, who shared his CellScope project that allows a cell phone to be used as a diagnostic tool; and Charles Koven, who discussed the impact of thawing permafrost on greenhouse gasses. The Lab’s Janet Jansson was also there moderating a discussion on the Earth Microbiome Project.

But I also went to hear from other communicators—public information officers, academic media relations, etc.—as well as from science journalists. And they were there aplenty. Cory Dean from the New York Times, Ivan Oransky from Reuters Health, and MSNBC’s Alan Boyle were just some of the top-tier journalists taking note of new research and keeping an eye out for promising experts for future stories.

It’s pretty clear from all the conversations that communicating scientific achievements is critical. With Washington, D.C., and state governments pondering their spending choices, a case must be made for what scientific research can accomplish, why the science is important, and why spend money on it at all.

Our jobs as institutional communicators—“translators” is better—is to take what is sometimes difficult science and find a way to craft stories that make people care.

And part of the challenge—short of understanding what we’re writing about in the first place—is to convince our researchers that communicating their work is crucial to the future success of research in their fields. People want to hear directly from the experts. How do we give them a voice to explain concisely and convincingly what they do?

“For the good of all of us, we need scientists to use clarity and precision when they explain their work, but we also need to understand their words,” Alan Alda, USA Today, 03/01/12

Three sessions at this year’s AAAS meeting stood out for me, all having to do with communicating science.

In one session, Andy Torr of the University of British Columbia (well, they didn’t have to travel far, did they?!) focused on the importance of communicating to the public. And it’s important to note that “public” really consists of many subgroups. Think policy-makers, the news media, non-scientifically-trained audience, etc.  And in fact, anyone that doesn’t share the same Ph.D. also makes up “the public.” The common theme is that we have to find ways to describe the research as a story, in a manner that cuts across educational boundaries.

Part of the challenge for researchers is that they’re often not trained in public speaking to a lay audience. It’s not what they went to school for, after all. As communicators we need to understand that and help them move beyond any inhibitions they may have. That’s what Illinois Science Council’s Monica Metzler made clear in her talk, Bad Presentation Bingo.

Metzler’s discussion focused on specific skills for successful public presentations. Simple things like limiting the use of PowerPoint slides; talking to the audience and not the projection screen; and reducing the reliance on laser pointers (which brought a knowing laugh from the audience).

These are skills to be used regardless of whether a scientist is talking to members of the news media, program managers, legislators, or at the local library.

Metzler also pointed out a glaring omission in the packed room. When asked what constituted the majority of those in attendance, press officers and communicators dominated the numbers. As one person remarked, “the wrong people are in this room.”

One person at AAAS who has mastered the art of communicating science was Hans Rosling. Rosling is a Professor of International Health with the Karolinska Institute and co-founder of Gapminder Foundation. A devotee of statistics, Rosling has found innovative ways to show how numbers can tell a story.

In the AAAS plenary panel discussion, Science Is Not Enough, he was joined in a discussion led by former CNN reporter Frank Sesno discussing how—and why it’s critical—to engage in communicating science.

Journalists also had opportunities to claim their stake in the conversation. In a session led by seasoned communicator Nancy Baron, the New York Times’ Cory Dean was joined by former academic media relations expert Dennis Meredith to highlight what researchers need to know to get the media’s attention in a 24/7 environment. Accuracy, timeliness, and access to experts all came up in conversation. Dean said researchers need to understand that since reporters aren’t in the same field as them using analogies can help clarify complex research.

It’s pretty clear that we’re all on the same page here. Working with researchers to feel more comfortable in front of a lay audience is the first step towards successfully communicating their work. Then, a greater effort must be made to find ways to better tell our stories to diverse audiences. We all have a passion for science in some form or another so let’s clearly and concisely explain just what researchers do.

Despite what our cartoon friend, Meyer, may think, popularizing science isn’t about stooping, but about rising up.

Just ask Robert Cheng, Combustion Technology Group Leader in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Berkeley Lab's Robert Cheng

In an event at the Claremont Hotel hosted by Berkeley Lab, representatives from private industry [...]]]> Sometimes it seems that National Laboratory scientists and scientists in private industry inhabit two different worlds. During the last week of January, two very high-level groups of them got together in the same room, and tried to learn from each other.

In an event at the Claremont Hotel hosted by Berkeley Lab, representatives from private industry and the 17 National Laboratories met for two days at a conference focused on ways the public and private sector can work more closely together. It was such an important meeting that Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu flew in from Washington D.C. to attend it.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu speaks at the Materials for Energy Applications meeting.

Despite the different missions of basic and applied science, it was easy to pick up the sense of common purpose. The focus of this meeting was on developing advanced materials — mostly lighter, stronger, and cheaper. I saw that scientists from both sectors truly believe that the future of manufacturing in America hangs on progress there. “Increasing our industrial competitiveness,” Chu told the gathering, “has become an obsession with me.”

There once was a time when the kind of basic research that takes place in the National Laboratories was common in industry as well. Secretary Chu and Berkeley Lab director Paul Alivisatos are both alums of Bell Laboratories, renowned in its prime for making fundamental breakthroughs. Chu won a Nobel Prize in Physics for work he did there. Today, the thinking goes that the National Laboratories and universities are the last sanctuaries for basic research, and the private sector is solely for research that can turn a dollar.

The level of corporate scientific brainpower on hand at the Materials for Energy Applications conference made it clear to me that extraordinary research is still occurring in the private sector. However, the flavor of it has changed, and the differences between the two cultures were discussed frankly. “If this had been an industry presentation, we would not just be focused on the science,” said Simon Bare, a Honeywell research fellow. “There would be something on the screen with dollar signs all over it.”

I also sensed an interesting subtext threading through much of the discussion. Basic research — rarefied, elite, expensive, and even described as ‘sexy’ — sometimes does not compute for industrial engineers intent on solving intensely practical questions on which the success or failure of new products may rest. As one General Motors battery scientist exclaimed, “It never occurred to me what an X-ray laser could do for me.” If there was a common refrain from industry, it was an acknowledgment that the science in National Laboratories was fabulous, but “what is it good for?” And as United Technologies’ Michael McQuade said pointedly, “You have to understand that people in industry work on a clock…We have to pay the piper back home.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu (left) with Berkeley Lab director Paul Alivisatos.

Perhaps the widest cultural gap between industry and government research centers on intellectual property. Research at public labs is, well, public. Research in corporate environments is proprietary. “Internally, you publish your knowledge gaps,’’ said Pratt & Whitney’s Sergio Loureiro. But this is not information to be shared. “It’s like asking us to publish our top problems,” he said.

Without a focus on the bottom line, the free-spirited inquiry of basic research makes many in industry nervous. But Stefan Wurm of the semiconductor industry consortium SEMATECH sees the work of National Laboratories as essential for the long term. “We need to work today to figure out what kind of materials we will need ten years from now,” he said. Here, collaborations with the government sector — like the one that launched SEMATECH 25 years ago— have made both business and scientific sense. When Sandia, LLNL, and Berkeley Lab began the $200 million collaboration with the industry, there were genuine fears that the U.S. was ceding the market to Japan. The results were extraordinary, and continue to pay off to this day.

In fact, it was very apparent to me that private industry badly wants a piece of the scientific action taking place at National Laboratories. It just needs a better sense of what is actually going on in those public labs, where to find out about it, and how to access it more quickly. Despite differences in focus over the proprietary nature of research, National Laboratories are reaching out to license their own technologies to the private sector, and business leaders made it clear they would simply like to speed up the process.

Honeywell research fellow Simon Bare

If the meeting was an effort to find common ground, you could find it during a poster session where the 17 National Laboratories were showcasing their science. The collegiality was genuine, and the enthusiasm was palpable. “By the evening’s poster session, I sensed a real shift,” said Cheryl Fragiadakis, head of Berkeley Lab’s Technology Transfer Department. “There was an excitement, an intensity, a feeling that more collaboration was possible, and that industry and lab staff had a better understanding of each others’ goals and interests.”

Berkeley Lab's Peidong Yang with meeting participants at the poster session.

A closing address by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla also inspired the group. “He encouraged taking risks with technologies that may seem like long shots, because the most disruptive technologies can be the greatest game changers,” Fragiadakis said.

With virtually every scientist at the conference having the initials PhD after their name, this was a meeting rooted in common experience. As a non-scientist observer looking for evidence of accord at this meeting, nothing was more apparent to me than the shared interest in nurturing young researchers and interns who work in universities, at National Labs, and in the private sector. The most valuable transfer of technology may occur with the exchange of talent, and everyone wanted to see more of it. As Pratt & Whitney’s Loureiro put it, “They are our future hires, our future engineers, and our future scientists.”

Or kitty litter.

Or slabs of [...]]]> Somewhere in a busy American seaport, a gamma ray detector meant to spot smuggled nuclear weapons material will scan the contents of a cargo container, and suddenly — off goes the alarm. But this time, like the last time, the feared substance will turn out to be a load of… bananas.

Or kitty litter.

Or slabs of granite for kitchen countertops.

To my surprise, I found out that such false alarms are not uncommon with the extraordinarily sensitive detectors put in place to guard U.S. shipping centers. Although bananas don’t quite compare with weapons-grade U-235, the natural potassium isotopes found in the yellow fruit often produce enough particles in a large shipment to produce a false-positive signal. Kitty litter is made from clay containing faint traces of radionuclide, and granite slabs contain enough natural uranium and thorium to trip radiation monitors — requiring a time-consuming physical inspection.

Berkeley Lab's Stephen Derenzo

Well aware of these problems, Berkeley Lab researchers led by Stephen Derenzo, senior scientist in the Life Sciences Division and Edith Bourret, senior scientist in the Material Sciences Division, have been exploring materials for gamma ray detectors that can distinguish the difference between the signals of threatening materials and those that are harmless. “If a shipment is found to contain radioactivity, you want to know what it is. It’s really vital, even if there were no terrorism,” Derenzo told me during a recent visit to his lab.

The critical component of these improved detectors is the scintillator, a fist-sized crystal of material that gives off a tiny burst of light every time it catches and stops a gamma ray. That signal is distinctive for each isotope of the radioactive element that emitted it. Derenzo explained that almost all radioactive elements produce a unique pattern of gamma ray energies. “When gamma rays are stopped by the crystal, the pattern of light flashes identifies the radioactive element,” he said.

A scintillator sample

Most commercial scanners use plastic scintillators, which are low-cost but only scatter gamma rays rather than stopping them. They can pick up the presence of the rays, but they can’t measure their energies — so they can’t distinguish in a sealed container a load of bananas from a plutonium pit. Sodium iodide scintillators are low cost but cannot measure the energies accurately enough to do the job. Crystals made from lanthanum bromide are better but impractically expensive. Derenzo said Germanium has outstanding gamma ray energy accuracy but is also expensive and requires super-cooling to -190°C.

During a high-throughput screening process developed under a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the scientists evaluated thousands of potential scintillator materials. The right combination of attributes? Dense enough to actually stop a gamma ray, inexpensive enough for handheld devices, and accurate enough to distinguish security threat isotopes from commonly shipped isotopes — like those in kitty litter and bananas. The process turned up dozens of new candidates that combined excellent gamma ray stopping power with excellent energy measurement accuracy. Small crystals of the best candidates were grown and evaluated as gamma ray detectors in Bourret’s lab with support from the Department of Energy NA22 office. A crystal made of cesium, barium, and iodine (CsBa₂I₅) produced the highest energy resolution ever reported.

Pleased with the results, the Department of Homeland Security arranged Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding for companies to develop the Berkeley Lab scintillators into commercially viable products. This fall, grants totaling $500,000 were awarded to three small research firms in Massachusetts: Radiation Monitoring Devices, Inc., Agiltron, Inc., and Capesym, Inc. First, they have to demonstrate they can grow one or more of the most-promising crystals. They include europium-doped CsBa₂I₅, BaBrI, BaBrCl, and BaClI, all discovered at Berkeley Lab. In later phases, they may partner with large chemical firms to scale-up production.

If successful, a new generation of radiation detectors will become widely available, with improved cost, sensitivity, and accuracy. The new materials discovered at Berkeley Lab hold the promise of a less cumbersome and more reliable cargo screening process. “We knew that better scintillators were waiting to be discovered,’’ Derenzo told me. “And our search paid off.’’