Insight into benzene formation could help development of cleaner combustion engines Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Florida International University have demonstrated the first real-time measurement—using lab-based methods—of free radical particles reacting under cosmic conditions, prompting elementary carbon and hydrogen atoms to coalesce into primal benzene rings. The researchers say that their findings, recently published in an open-access paper in the journal Science Advances, are key to understanding how the universe evolved with the growth of carbon compounds. That insight could also help the car industry make cleaner combustion engines.