News archive

Browse the full collection of SLAC news releases and features and stay up to date on the latest scientific advancements at the laboratory.

NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has issued its first scientific alerts, marking a historic milestone in astrophysics and kicking off a new era of dynamic, real-time observation of the night sky.

Star-filled teal night sky with turquoise glowing band, scattered “DATA ALERT” tags, and a white icon of the Rubin Observatory atop dark mountains.

The team developed a platform that uses powerful X-rays from the lab’s LCLS X-ray laser to resolve for the first time the evolution of instabilities in high-density plasmas. 

Illustration of filament-like structures in plasma

SLAC and Stanford researchers have developed a breakthrough technique that quantifies energy dissipation in complex, small systems, offering insights into energy use, efficiency, and speed in computers and other devices.

Illustration with colorful dots

Derek Mendez and Xueli “Sherry” Zheng aim to accelerate drug discovery and improve energy storage.

Man and woman

SLAC experts discuss how microelectronics impacts our lives and where the future lies in this Q&A.

Angelo Dragone and Paul McIntyre

Salleo sees strength in the big picture and minute details of the people, tools and partnerships at SLAC.

Portrait of Alberto Salleo

Pages from the Codex Climaci Rescriptus palimpsest from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, were brought to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource to recover erased astronomical text, especially fragments from Hipparchus' star catalog.

A photo showing pages of the Codex Climaci Rescriptus palimpsest.
News Brief · Via The University of Manchester

443-million-year-old fossils reveal early vertebrate eyes

Using SSRL, scientists uncovered fossil evidence that the first groups of vertebrates possessed surprisingly advanced eyes. 

fossil specimen in gray rock with bright marcations overlain

Cosmologists Josh Frieman and Risa Wechsler look back on the Dark Energy Survey, sharing how it’s paving the way for Rubin Observatory to dig deeper into some of the universe’s darkest mysteries.

Josh Frieman and Risa Wechsler

The latest results combined weak lensing and galaxy clustering and incorporated four dark energy probes from a single experiment for the first time.

Photo of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes at night.