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Tiny microbes and molecular machines have an outsized impact on human health, and they play key roles in the vast global cycles that shape climate and make carbon and nitrogen available to all living things. 

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Science of life

This illustration shows arrestin, an important type of signaling protein

News Feature

Researchers expect the new method to answer fundamental questions in biology and materials science. First up: Images showing molecules that help guide cell division...

cryo-EM image of Caulobacter bacterium
News Feature

Physicists at SLAC and Stanford propose that the influence of cosmic rays on early life may explain nature’s preference for a uniform “handedness” among...

Chirality graphic
News Feature

Understanding nature’s process could inform the next generation of artificial photosynthetic systems that produce clean and renewable energy from sunlight and water.

How electrons flow in the oxygen-evolving complex of Photosystem II.
News Feature

The lab is responding to the coronavirus crisis by imaging disease-related biomolecules, developing standards for reliable coronavirus testing and enabling other essential research.

SARS-CoV-2
News Feature

Researchers investigate how much damage spreads through molecules struck by a pulse from LCLS.

Two color mode
News Feature

This new technology could enable future insights into chemical and biological processes that occur in solution, such as vision, catalysis and photosynthesis.

UED liquid
Press Release

The giant cavity, in a protein that transports nutrients across the cell membrane, is unlike anything researchers have seen before.

A scientist working overlaid on a world map and images of tuberculosis bacteria.
News Feature

An LCLS imaging technique reveals how a mosquito-borne bacterium deploys a toxin to kill mosquito larvae. Scientists hope to harness it to fight disease.

A photograph of mosquito larvae.
News Brief

The 1950s and ‘60s poisoning event was long attributed to methylmercury, but studies at SLAC suggest a different compound was to blame. The findings...

Illustration of toxic waste being dumped from a pipe, a molecule, and a map showing the location of Minamata, Japan.
News Feature

A better understanding of this phenomenon, which is crucial to many processes that occur in biological systems and materials, could enable researchers to develop...

photoexcitation
News Brief

Cryogenic electron microscopy can in principle make out individual atoms in a molecule, but distinguishing the crisp from the blurry parts of an image...

An overall image of the apoferritin molecule (left) and a small section (right)
News Brief

A new understanding of the nucleation process could shed light on how the shells help microbes interact with their environments, and help people design...

Illustration of tiles forming a microbial shell