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

Cleaning Up Hybrid Battery Electrodes Improves Capacity and Lifespan

PNNL chemists discovered they could make superior hybrid battery materials with a technology — called ion soft-landing — that intricately controls the raw components with a membrane that separates the ions, setting down only the negative ions on the electrode surfaces.

ANNIE Finds a Home at Fermilab

A little experiment with big ambitions just finished moving in this week after a year’s worth of planning and research. The Accelerator Neutrino-Neutron Interaction Experiment, called ANNIE, recently settled down and began taking phase one data on April 15.

Chemistry Consortium Uses Titan to Understand Actinides

A multi-institution team has been using computing resources at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to understand actinide chemistry at the molecular level in hopes of designing methods to clean up contamination and safely store spent nuclear fuel.

Unexpected Discovery Leads to a Better Battery

An unexpected discovery by a team based at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has led to a rechargeable battery that's as inexpensive as conventional car batteries, but has a much higher energy density.

New Paper Examines Hydrogen at High Pressure

A team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outlines how they used X-rays to look into the interior of a hydrogen target, looking for free electrons to appear in high pressure shock waves formed when hydrogen is shot with a high-energy laser beam.

'Odd Couple' Monolayer Semiconductors Align to Advance Optoelectronics

A research group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has shown that different lattice constants – for creating transistor and semiconductor substrates - can be grown together to form a perfectly aligned stacking bilayer material.

Elusive State of Superconducting Matter Discovered after 50 Years

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have produced the first direct evidence of a state of electronic matter first predicted by theorists in 1964. The discovery, described in a paper published online April 13, 2016, in Nature, may provide key insights into the workings of high-temperature superconductors.

New "EA" Biomass Pretreatment Cuts Enzyme Use, Boosts Biofuel Production

Less input, more output. That’s the achievement of a new biomass pretreatment method that could help improve the economics of cellulosic biofuels, the second-generation biofuels made from grasses, wood, and the inedible parts of plants.

Critical Materials Institute Gains Ten Industrial and Research Affiliates

The Critical Materials Institute, a U.S. Department of Energy Innovation Hub led by the Ames Laboratory, has gained ten new affiliates to its research program, seeking ways to eliminate and reduce reliance on rare-earth metals and other materials critical to the success of clean energy technologies.

Science.gov is Hosting New Interagency Microsites Listing STEM Education and Training Opportunities for Undergraduate and Graduate Students

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has collaborated with other Federal agencies through the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM) and the Science.gov Alliance to establish two new interagency websites designed to connect undergraduate and graduate students with federally-sponsored education and training opportunities in STEM fields.

Ames Laboratory Physicists Discover New Type of Material That May Speed Computing

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have discovered a topological metal, PtSn4 (platinum and tin), with a unique electronic structure that may someday lead to energy efficient computers with increased processor speeds and data storage.

Multiyear Simulation Study Provides Breakthrough in Membrane Protein Research

The research team of Benoît Roux, a professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a senior scientist in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory Center for Nanoscale Materials recently concluded a three-year Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) project at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, to understand how P-type ATPase ion pumps—an important class of membrane transport proteins—operate.