LAB REPORT

Across the U.S. national laboratory system, a broad convergence is underway, one that marries the discovery of natural rare-earth-binding proteins with high-throughput, AI-driven engineering.

The poster child for this movement is a protein called lanmodulin, discovered in bacteria that use rare earth elements as a metabolic cofactor. Lanmodulin binds lanthanides with picomolar affinity and extraordinary selectivity. For years, however, studying it was painfully slow.

Traditional protein screening methods test one variant at a time, making large-scale discovery impractical.

That changed in April 2026, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory published a breakthrough in Nature Chemical Biology. Their platform, named SpyCI-LAMBS and nicknamed “spicy lambs,” enables parallel screening of hundreds of protein variants in a single 96-well plate run.

“It only took about a month to collect 600 proteins' worth of data with this new assay,” said LLNL scientist and first author Patrick Diep. “It would have taken three to five years with the usual process.”

Think of the heaviness that remains after your Uncle Frank starts an explosive conversation about politics at Thanksgiving dinner. That may be the least scientific, much less cosmic way of describing a neutron star — the dense core that remains after a massive star explodes. And NASA could be on the verge of discovering more of them across the Milky Way.

A new study suggests NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could reveal dozens of hidden neutron stars in our galaxy, according to a NASA media release.

When a neutron star passes in front of a distant star, its gravity bends the background star’s light, causing a temporary brightening and a tiny shift in the star’s position. This effect, known as astrometric microlensing, can reveal both the presence and mass of the otherwise invisible object.

“What’s really cool about using microlensing is that you can get direct mass measurements,” Peter McGill, a co-author from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in the announcement.

Omar DeGuchy remembers the moment he left the comfort of UC Merced — the place he’d found his footing — and stepped onto what some call “the smartest square mile on Earth.” He defended his Ph.D. dissertation in applied mathematics remotely in 2020 and started a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

DeGuchy’s journey from a first-generation college student unsure of his future to a staff scientist at one of the nation’s premier labs reflects a growing trend. UC Merced has an expanding pipeline of students finding their place, their confidence and their futures at national laboratories.

DeGuchy credits internships secured during his time at UC Merced, including at LLNL’s Data Science Summer Institute, for opening his eyes to the possibility of government research.

“In both internships, it was really appealing to me how the teams worked together,” he said. “I really liked that collaborative research; it was something that I was already doing at UC Merced.”

Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a 3D-printed electrode design for electrochemical energy storage (EES) devices such as rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors.

It solves the conflict between high capacity (storing a lot of energy) and high power (releasing it quickly) in storage devices.

The development opted for an optimized, interlocking 3D design to eliminate “dead zones” where ions are typically trapped. This new architecture doubles storage capacity without impacting the charging speed or reliability required for applications such as electric vehicles and grid storage.

“In conventional slab-like designs, a lot of the battery material becomes underutilized because ions cannot reach deep regions efficiently, creating dead zones and concentrated resistive losses near interfaces,” explained Giovanna Bucci, a co-author and staff researcher in the Computational Engineering Division (CED) at LLNL.

A new mission promises to 'open the box' on exoplanet science. Scientists and engineers recently released the first engineering images from the Pandora exoplanet survey mission. The pictures represent the first ever images from a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission. Established in 2020, the program looks to test the feasibility of small low cost missions designed to address key questions in astronomy and astrophysics.

Pandora launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 11th of this year, along with SPARCS and BlackCAT. The launch was part of the Twilight rideshare initiative. The smallsat was developed for NASA in partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) along with Blue Canyon Technologies and Corning Incorporated.

The Pandora mission has two primary instruments working in tandem in the visible to near infrared wavelengths.