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

Kneading Enzyme Makes Ammonia Levels Rise

Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Lab, Utah State, Montana State and Virginia Tech have discovered how two natural proteins work together to speed the generation of ammonia; findings that may be important in future fertilizer production.

North to Alaska: Researchers Rush to Understand Warming Trend

The ARM Airborne Carbon Measurements V (ARM-ACME V) team—led by Sebastien Biraud from U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—will run an aerial campaign from June 1 to September 15, measuring trace gas concentrations, aerosols, and cloud properties to find out why current climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is getting warmer.

President Obama Names Scientists Pellegrini and Shank as 2014 Enrico Fermi Award Recipients

President Obama has named Dr. Claudio Pellegrini and Dr. Charles V. (Chuck) Shank as recipients of the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the government's oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement.

Scientists See Ripples of a Particle-Separating Wave In Primordial Plasma

Scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have new evidence for what’s called a “chiral magnetic wave” rippling through the soup of quark-gluon plasma created in RHIC’s energetic particle smashups.

BESC, Mascoma Develop Revolutionary Microbe for Biofuel Production

Biofuels pioneer Mascoma LLC and the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center have developed a revolutionary strain of yeast that could help significantly accelerate the development of biofuels from nonfood plant matter.

The Universe at Your Fingertips

Raw images from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Legacy Survey’s new image archive will appear online the day after they are taken.

JGI's Carbon Cycling Studies on Restored Marshes (Video)

DOE Joint Genome Institute Metagenome Program Head, Susannah Tringe, and postdoc, Susie Theroux, discuss the lessons to be learned from studying the microbial diversity of marshes that have been converted to other uses, and are now being restored, as well as the potential impacts on the global carbon cycle.

Giant Structures Called Plasmoids Could Simplify the Design of Future Tokamaks

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time simulated the formation of structures called "plasmoids" during Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI), a process that could simplify the design of fusion facilities known as tokamaks.

Using Robots at Berkeley Lab, Scientists Assemble Promising Antimicrobial Compounds

Researchers from Denmark’s Roskilde University used the first-class capabilities of the Molecular Foundry – an Office of Science User Facility – to create new compounds which may eventually be useful against drug-resistant bacteria.

Meraculous: Deciphering the ‘Book of Life’ With Supercomputers

By applying some novel algorithms, computational techniques and the innovative programming language Unified Parallel C (UPC) to the cutting-edge de novo genome assembly tool Meraculous, a team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Computational Research Division (CRD), Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and UC Berkeley, simplified and sped up genome assembly, reducing a months-long process to mere minutes.

Spiraling Laser Pulses Could Change the Nature of Graphene

A new study at SLAC predicts that researchers could use spiraling pulses of laser light to change the nature of graphene, turning it from a metal into an insulator and giving it other peculiar properties that might be used to encode information.

The ‘Why’ of Models

A team led by Oak Ridge National Lab spearheads approach to improve ecosystem models with experimental data.