2017 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

There and Back Again: Catalyst Mediates Energy-Efficient Proton Transport for Reversibility

Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that a complex with a proton pathway and stabilized by outer coordination sphere interactions is reversible for hydrogen production/oxidation at room temperature and pressure.

Researchers Catch Extreme Waves with High-Resolution Modeling

Using decades of global climate data generated at a spatial resolution of about 25 kilometers squared, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) were able to capture the formation of tropical cyclones, also referred to as hurricanes and typhoons, and the extreme waves that they generate.

Army Researchers Use Neutrons to Study Ceramic Material as Possible Lightweight Vehicle Armor

The U.S. Army Research Lab and Australian Defence Science and Technology Group are collaborating to study ceramic materials for potential use in the design of military vehicle armor using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor.

Erin Webb: Exploring the Possibilities of a Bioeconomy

Agricultural engineer Erin Webb studies biomass at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to understand how plants can be harvested, stored, processed, and transported to produce fuels or bio-derived materials for 3D printing.

Next-Gen Dark Matter Detector in a Race to Finish Line

The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, which will be built nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, S.D., is considered one of the best bets yet to determine whether theorized dark matter particles known as WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) actually exist.

New Study of Ferroelectrics Offers Roadmap to Multivalued Logic for Neuromorphic Computing

A team of researchers from Argonne, the Lille University of Science and Technology and the University of Picardie Jules Verne have laid out a theoretical map to use ferroelectric material to process information using multivalued logic – a leap beyond the simple ones and zeroes that make up our current computing systems that could let us process information much more efficiently.

Scientists Estimate Solar Nebula's Lifetime

Scientists from MIT, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro have estimated the lifetime of the solar nebula — a key stage during which much of the solar system evolution took shape – after analyzing angrites, which are some of the oldest and most pristine of planetary rocks.

Chemicals Hitch a Ride onto New Protein for Better Compounds

Chemists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a powerful new method of selectively linking chemicals to proteins, a major advance in the manipulation of biomolecules that could transform the way drugs are developed, proteins are probed, and molecules are tracked and imaged.

Machine Learning Accurately Predicts Metallic Defects

For the first time, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have built and trained machine learning algorithms to predict defect behavior in certain intermetallic compounds with high accuracy.

Exploring the Matter that Filled the Early Universe

Quark Matter 2017 conference brings together nuclear physicists seeking to understand the force that binds the building blocks of visible matter.

Bianca Haberl: Finding the Joys of Science Under Pressure

Haberl, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, focuses on compressing and transforming silicon and related elements into new materials and studying the transformed structures with neutron scattering at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

The Shape of Melting in Two Dimensions

University of Michigan researchers carried out a series of hard particle simulations on the Titan supercomputer to study how particle shape affects the physics of melting in two-dimensional systems.