Big Ideas Lab

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Rare Earth Elements

September 29, 2026

Rare-earth elements are hidden inside nearly every piece of modern technology - your phone, electric vehicles, fighter jets. They aren't scarce in number. They're scarce because pulling them apart is one of the hardest problems in chemistry, and the United States depends almost entirely on other countries to do it.At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists are borrowing a solution nature spent millions of years perfecting - and inventing new materials that could make overlooked ele...

CODA Telescope

September 15, 2026

The breakthrough wasn’t a new telescope. It was a new way to build one.For decades, space telescopes were built as exquisite, one-of-a-kind instruments. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took a different approach: design for “good enough” instead of perfect, and rethink how a telescope is manufactured, engineered and integrated for space.The result was CODA, an easily manufacturable, lower-cost telescope that helped turn a small NASA exoplanet mission called Pandora from an idea into som...

Science of Scale-Up

September 01, 2026

A scientific breakthrough is only the beginning. World-changing technologies can take decades to move from a successful experiment to something people can actually use. In this episode, Lawrence Livermore researchers explain the science of scale-up. From durability, cost, manufacturing, and unexpected changes in performance to the risks that can stall a promising idea, LLNL combines modeling, experimentation, risk assessment, and industry partnerships to help breakthroughs reach the real worl...