2018 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

JBEI researchers Jay Keasling (left) and Itay Budin. (Credit: Irina Silva/Berkeley Lab)

Potential New Way to Boost Biofuels and Bioproducts Production

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have gained insight into the primary process by which all cells harness energy, known as cellular respiration, of E. coli bacteria and a species of yeast, each of which are common hosts for biofuels and bioproducts.

This shows a) Chinese ink and writing brush, similar to those used for writing and drawing for over 2000 years, b) digital and infrared images of the Chinese character “water” written in Chinese ink under simulated sunlight and c) a scheme of the fabrication process for ALD/Chinese‐ink‐coated materials. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)

Why the Future of Water Purification May Involve Chinese Ink

A substance developed thousands of years ago could help accelerate solutions to the world’s freshwater crisis.

Rice University graduate student Lebing Chen spent three months perfecting a recipe for making flat sheets of chromium triiodide, a two-dimensional quantum material that appears to be a “magnetic topological insulator.” (Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

'Magnetic Topological Insulator' Makes its Own Magnetic Field

A team of U.S. and Korean physicists has found the first evidence of a two-dimensional material that can become a magnetic topological insulator even when it is not placed in a magnetic field.

Steven Ehrlich, Jiahao Huang, Anatoly Frenkel

Light-Activated, Single-Ion Catalyst Breaks Down Carbon Dioxide

A team of scientists has discovered a single-site, visible-light-activated catalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into “building block” molecules that could be used for creating useful chemicals. The discovery opens the possibility of using sunlight to turn a greenhouse gas into hydrocarbon fuels.

Jibo Sanyal: Connecting Leadership Science to Real-world Impact

Since joining ORNL in 2011, Sanyal has been a postdoc, staff scientist and team lead for Scalable and High Performance Geocomputation. Today, he is acting leader of the Computational Urban Sciences group in ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division.

Meet NSLS-II's Tom Caswell: Lead Developer of Matplotlib

Computational scientist Tom Caswell is helping to solve one of today’s biggest challenges in science: how to collect, manage, and analyze big data. Based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Caswell’s task is to streamline data acquisition at the National Synchrotron Light Source II—a DOE Office of Science User Facility that is one of the most advanced light sources in the world.

One of the heated plots at the Harvard Forest (Jeff Blanchard)

Hidden Giants in Forest Soils

Giant virus genomes have been discovered for the first time in a forest soil ecosystem by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass Amherst).

Two men working with Argonne’s Continuous Flow Reactor

Argonne Adapting Continuous Flow Processing to Complex Nanomaterials to Reduce Manufacturing Costs

Argonne ‘s Advanced Synthesis in Continuous Flow Reactor program applies powerful analysis and characterization tools to understand processes at the atomic level to advance manufacturing of fine chemicals and nanosized materials.

UEC Profile: ‘An ARM Loyalist’

As a graduate student, Pavlos Kollias discovered the allure of millimeter cloud radar, a specialty that he says put him ‘among great minds.’

Department of Energy Announces 32 R&D 100 Award Winners

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) researchers have won 32 of the R&D 100 awards given out this year by R&D Magazine. The annual awards are given in recognition of exceptional new products or processes that were developed and introduced into the marketplace during the previous year. The R&D 100 Awards were presented on Friday, November 16th in Orlando, Florida.

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.