University Research | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

New Ways to Control Bacterial Factories for Future Biotech Uses

The lab of Cheryl Kerfeld at Michigan State University has developed a new method to manipulate miniature factories found in bacteria that could someday lead to new medical, industrial, or energy applications.

PNW Forests Will be Less Vulnerable to Drought, Fire than Rocky Mountain, Sierra Forests

Forests in the Pacific Northwest will be less vulnerable to drought and fire over the next three decades than those in the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, computer modeling by researchers in Oregon State University’s College of Forestry shows.

Stretchy Solar Cells a Step Closer

Organic solar cells that can be painted or printed on surfaces are increasingly efficient, and now show promise for incorporation into applications like clothing that also require them to be flexible. The Rice University lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Rafael Verduzco has developed flexible organic photovoltaics that could be useful where constant, low-power generation is sufficient.

UMD Research Team Develops Compact Solid State Cooling Technology

A research team in the University of Maryland Department of Materials Science and Engineering has developed a novel compact solid-state cooling device, which can be used to prevent household electronics - such as laptops - from heating up, or even to treat epilepsy via local cooling of the human brain.

UChicago Scientists Create Way to Power Pacemaker with Light

University of Chicago scientists have developed a method to create a solar cell pacemaker, which may be less invasive and less harmful to living tissue.

Turning Trash into Fuel

Scientists at the University of South Florida are taking the lab to the landfill, refining a groundbreaking process that uses trash to make liquid fuel.

U.S. Energy Department Funds Geography Project at UGA

The United States Department of Energy is funding $10 million toward 13 separate projects working to further improve the Energy Exascale Earth System Model. Gabriel J. Kooperman, assistant professor of geography at the University of Georgia, is leading a collaboration with other universities on one of those projects.

Scientist at Work: To Take Atomic-scale Pictures of Tiny Crystals, Use a Huge, Kilometer-long Synchrotron

It turns out to be fairly complicated to figure out how electricity will flow through materials – a crucial question for designing new electronics and semiconductor materials.

Reverse Engineering Reveals Pine Tree's Chemical Production — Worth Billions

Washington State University researchers have reverse engineered the way a pine tree produces a resin, which could serve as an environmentally friendly alternative to a range of fossil‑fuel based products worth billions of dollars.

Taming Turbulence: Seeking to Make Complex Simulations a Breeze

An improved model for how shear-flow turbulence changes in different systems will more easily address previously intractable problems for understanding phenomena such as star formation and the dynamics of galaxies without the need for expensive supercomputers.

Massive New Dark Matter Detector Gets its 'Eyes'

Brown University researchers have assembled two massive arrays of photomultiplier tubes, powerful light sensors that will serve as the "eyes" for the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter detector, which will start its search for dark matter particles in 2020.

Researchers Create Tiny Droplets of Early Universe Matter

Researchers at CU Boulder and colleagues at Vanderbilt University have created tiny droplets of the ultra-hot matter that once filled the early universe, forming three distinct shapes and sizes: circles, ellipses and triangles.