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

Solid-State Processing: New Paths to New Materials

Scientists at Ames Laboratory and the Iowa State University are creating materials by solid-state processing because it offers advantages: costs less than other methods, doesn’t require solvents, often can be done without heat, and uses relatively low energy inputs.

Taking Materials into the Third Dimension

To create more efficient catalysts and separation devices, scientists would like to start with porous materials with controlled atomic-scale structures as random defects can hamper performance. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a team created a one-pot method that produces complex, highly oriented three-dimensional pore structures.

Connecting the Bytes

Computer scientist Ramakrishnan Kannan has created a distributive machine learning tool – which collects and sorts enormous amounts of data in a fraction of the time of other methods – through a project funded by ORNL’s laboratory directed research and development program.

Fermilab Achieves Milestone Beam Power for Neutrino Experiments

Thanks to recent upgrades to the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator, Fermilab scientists have produced 700-kilowatt proton beams for the lab’s experiments.

PPPL Physicist Uncovers Clues to Mechanism Behind Magnetic Reconnection

Physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has published a paper showing that magnetic reconnection — the process in which magnetic field lines snap together and release energy — can be triggered by motion in nearby magnetic fields.

Turning Research Data into Scientific Discoveries

Line Pouchard, an information specialist in computational science, brings her expertise in big data management and curation to Brookhaven Lab's Center for Data-Driven Discovery.

The Contradictory Catalyst

Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have found the key to speeding up the rate of reaction of a potential catalyst for energy storage lies in making the reactive parts of the catalyst move more slowly.

Read more about The Contradictory Catalyst

A Rising Peptide: Supercomputing Helps Scientists Come Closer to Tailoring Drug Molecules

With the help of the Mira supercomputer, located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory a team of researchers led by biophysicists at the University of Washington have come one step closer to designing tailor-made drug molecules that are more precise and carry fewer side effects than most existing therapeutic compounds.

sPHENIX Gets CD0 for Upgrade to Experiment Tracking the Building Blocks of Matter

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has granted “Critical Decision-Zero” (CD-0) status to the sPHENIX project, a transformation of one of the particle detectors at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory—into a research tool with unprecedented precision for tracking subatomic interactions.

Seeking Structure With Metagenome Sequences

A team led by University of Washington’s David Baker worked with researchers at the Joint Genome Institute to generate structural models for 12 percent of the approximately 15,000 protein families, using computational modeling methods to view structures and determine protein functions.

Kai Xiao: Growing Novel, Nanoscale Materials to Support Future Energy Needs

Kai Xiao's work as a staff scientist at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Science gives him access to some of the world’s most powerful tools to investigate materials as small as one-billionth of a meter, or at the nanoscale.

Using Sunlight to Activate the Flow of Electrical Current in a New Material

A team of scientists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new material that absorbs visible light to generate electricity; this material might be useful for splitting water to produce a combustible fuel, hydrogen.