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

DOE Laboratories Win Gordon Bell Prize

Two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories were recently awarded the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Gordon Bell Prize. A team co-led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was recognized for their paper “Attacking the Opioid Epidemic: Determining the Epistatic and Pleiotropic Genetic Architectures for Chronic Pain and Opioid Addiction,” and a team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was recognized for their paper “Exascale Deep Learning for Climate Analytics.”

NSLS-II scientists Scott Coburn (left) and Wah-Keat Lee (right)

Making X-ray Microscopy 10 Times Faster

Scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have developed a transmission x-ray microscope that can image samples 10 times faster than previously possible.

Scientists Produce 3-D Chemical Maps of Single Bacteria

Researchers at NSLS-II used ultrabright x-rays to generate 3-D nanoscale maps of a single bacteria's chemical composition with unparalleled spatial resolution

Argonne's Pioneering Computing Program Pivots to Exascale

When it comes to the breadth and range of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory’s contributions to the field of high-performance computing (HPC), few if any other organizations come close. Argonne has been building advanced parallel computing environments and tools since the 1970s. Today, the laboratory serves as both an expertise center and a world-renowned source of cutting-edge computing resources used by researchers to tackle the most pressing challenges in science and engineering.

Climate Simulations Project Wetter, Windier Hurricanes

New supercomputer simulations by climate scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown that climate change intensified the amount of rainfall in recent hurricanes such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria by 5 to 10 percent. They further found that if those hurricanes were to occur in a future world that is warmer than present, those storms would have even more rainfall and stronger winds.

X-rays Show How Periods of Stress Changed an Ice Age Hyena to the Bone

An international team that includes researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory mapped trace elements within Pleistocene fossils to learn about the life of a long-extinct subspecies of spotted hyena.

Truffe noire du Peěrigord (Tuber melanosporum). (Francis Martin)

Symbiosis a Driver of Truffle Diversity

A team led by Francis Martin and his colleagues at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, Genoscope, and University of Torino, and including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, sought insights into the ECM lifestyle of truffle-forming species.

Rendering of the molecular structure of a peptoid polymer that was studied by a team led by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. The team's success in imaging the atomic-scale structure of polymers could help inform the designs of plastics, like those in the water bottles shown here. (Credit: Berkeley Lab, Charles Rondeau/PublicDomainPictures.net)

Scientists Bring Polymers Into Atomic-Scale Focus

Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers capture detailed images using electron-based imaging and computer simulations

A heavy overhead crane is used to lower the 64,000-pound inner reflector plug into position, right in the heart of the Spallation Neutron Source. (image credit: ORNL/Genevieve Martin)

Big Jobs: Safety, Planning Key to Increasing Production Performance at SNS

In December 2017, the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) entered into an extended 5 month scheduled outage to perform a number of high-priority jobs needed to ensure safe and reliable operation at higher powers. Most notable were the replacement of the facility’s inner reflector plug (IRP) and the accelerator’s radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ).

Mingxing Lin, Dmytro Nykypanchuck, and Mircea Cotlet

Detecting Light in a Different Dimension

Electrically conductive polymer nanostructures that are many times longer than they are wide make graphene—atom-thin sheets of carbon—a better light detector

Tyson Lanigan-Atkins, a PhD student at Duke University, uses the cold (lower-energy) neutron triple-axis spectrometer at ORNL’s High Flux Isotope Reactor to study thermoelectric materials. Image Credit: ORNL/Genevieve Martin

Cold Neutrons Used in Hot Pursuit of Better Thermoelectrics

Engineers from Duke University are using cold (lower- energy) neutron scattering techniques at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to study the vibrational motions of atoms, called “phonons,” which is how heat propagates through thermoelectric materials.

Temperatures near the bottom plate for Rayleigh-Benard Convection flow in a cylindrical container.

INCITE Grants Awarded to 62 Computational Research Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced 62 projects for 2019 aimed at accelerating discovery and innovation to address some of the world’s most challenging science problems through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.