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

ORNL-led Study Analyzes Electric Grid Vulnerabilities in Extreme Weather Areas

Climate and energy scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to pinpoint which electrical service areas will be most vulnerable as populations grow and temperatures rise.

Fermilab Bids a Fond Farewell to MINOS

After more than a decade of running, on June 29, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search experiment and its second iteration, MINOS+, concluded their runs. MINOS was the first of its kind at Fermilab, a high-power experiment that shot a beam of neutrinos through two detectors spaced hundreds of miles apart.

SLAC X-ray Studies Help NASA Develop Printable Electronics for Mars Mission

With help at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, scientists create plasma-printed sensors to monitor astronaut health on long space trips.

A New Leaf: Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Fuel

In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers have found a way to convert carbon dioxide into a usable energy source by using sunlight.

Study Finds Molecular Switch That Triggers Bacterial Pathogenicity

Using an array of high-powered X-ray imaging techniques, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) showed that histone-like proteins that bind to DNA are related to the physical twisting of the genetic strand, and that the supercoiling of the chromosome can trigger the expression of genes that make a microbe invasive.

Diamonds Help Generate New Record for Static Pressures for Study

An international team working at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory has devised a method for achieving static pressures vastly higher than any previously reached.

ORNL Computational Resources and Experts Support Cancer Moonshot Initiative

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will add its computational know-how to the battle against cancer through several new projects recently announced at the White House Cancer Moonshot Summit.

Teasing Out the Microbiome of the Kansas Prairie

In one of the most in-depth looks to-date at a soil metagenome — all the genetic material recovered from a sample of soil — a PNNL team has reconstructed portions of the genomes of 129 species of microbes, the first steps in identifying the genomes of the estimated 100,000 species in the sample.

Fast-Growth Cyanobacteria Have Allure for Biofuel and Chemical Production

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in collaboration with scientists from several other institutions found that Synechococcus 7003, commonly called a form of blue-green algae, is an attractive target for scientists and engineers trying to create better, less expensive biofuels or develop tools for churning out custom chemicals.

Physicists Show Trilayer Metal Oxide’s True Stripes

A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory describe a process to create a triple-layer metal oxide in a never-before-made single-crystal form; and observed in it an interesting phenomenon called charge striping, which may shed light on the physics behind similar useful electronic properties of metal oxides, such as superconductivity.

Fundamental Fission Modeling Finds a Foothold

Using the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team led by Aurel Bulgac of the University of Washington is spearheading this effort by developing a novel theoretical approach that extends DFT to superfluid nuclei, which exhibit characteristics similar to other strongly interacting systems of many fermions, or particles with half-integer spin such as superconducting materials.

New Nontoxic Process Promises Larger Ultrathin Sheets of 2D Nanomaterials

A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a novel way to produce two-dimensional nanosheets by separating bulk materials with nontoxic liquid nitrogen.