ESD’s Javier Ceja-Navarro was featured this past week (May 7, 2015) in a video presentation within a Gizmodo article, on the potential of biofuel derived from insects—“a strange new future for agriculture and energy production.”
ESD’s Ken Williams, recently featured in DOE JGI's collaborating science videos, describes the Genomes-to-Watershed Scientific Focus Area research activities at the Rifle, Colorado.
The U.C. Global Food Initiative, extensively supported by ESD environmental and climate programs within Berkeley Lab, is inviting applications for a student fellowship opportunity. Applications are due October 1, 2014.
Eoin Brodie and Boris Faybishenko recently co-chaired the first Complex Soil Systems Conference in downtown Berkeley. This flagship conference, strove to develop “A Path to Improved Understanding of Complex Soil Systems.”
ESD’s Javier Ceja-Navarro and others have characterized the gut microbiome of a wood-feeding beetle native to the eastern US, finding in its gut a metabolic capability permitting both aerobic and anaerobic activity, as well as N2 fixation.
Harry Beller and others recently found homologs of Escherichia coli FabG, an essential reductase involved in fatty acid biosynthesis, in work that could serve as a starting point for microbial production of fatty acid-derived biofuels.
Jennifer Druhan and others incorporated the stable isotopes of sulfur within a reactive-transfer code to model the range of microbially mediated redox processes affecting isotope fractionation—potentially important for bioremediation.
Ken Williams recently custom-generated snow at DOE’s Rifle, CO, site, as part of an effort to measure the level of snowmelt infiltration into soil and groundwater at the site.
ESD’s Janet Jansson and fellow scientists from the JGI and Michigan State University report (in PNAS) the largest soil DNA sequencing effort to date—providing both a method for sifting through the data deluge and a reality check.
Earlier this week, DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) hosted a summit and technology showcase in National Harbor, Maryland, in which they debuted four project videos. One of them, on biofuels, prominently mentions ESD’s Christer Jansson and his innovative work.
