News Archive | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Connecting the Dots

Nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and their partners are using America’s most powerful supercomputers to characterize the behavior of objects, from subatomic neutrons to neutron stars, that differ dramatically in size yet are closely connected by physics.

Jefferson Lab Completes 12 GeV Upgrade

Nuclear physicists are now poised to embark on a new journey of discovery into the fundamental building blocks of the nucleus of the atom. The completion of the 12 GeV Upgrade Project of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) heralds this new era to image nuclei at their deepest level.

Liverwort Genes and Land Plant Evolution

An international team including researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, analyzed the genome sequence of the common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha) to identify genes and gene families that were deemed crucial to plant evolution and have been conserved over millions of years and across plant lineages.

Assessing Regional Earthquake Risk and Hazards in the Age of Exascale

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) national laboratories, as well as the University of California at Davis are building the first-ever end-to-end simulation code to precisely capture the geology and physics of regional earthquakes, and how the shaking impacts buildings.

SLAC Invention Could Lead to Novel Terahertz Light Sources That Help Us See the World with Different Eyes

A new device could open new avenues for the generation of high-frequency radiation with applications in science, radar, communications, security and medical imaging.

Surrounded by Potential: New Science in Converting Biomass

Ames Laboratory scientists are working to develop a method to deconstruct lignin in a way that is economically feasible and into stable, readily useful components.

Susan Hogle: Knowledge Gained

Hogle is a nuclear engineer in the Nuclear Materials Processing Group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her work in the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center focuses on advanced radioisotope production techniques and finding new methods to make them cheaper and faster.

Berkeley Lab-led ECP Co-Design Center Achieves Orders of Magnitude Speed-Up in Latest Software Release

Just one year after the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Exascale Computing Program began funding projects to prepare scientific applications for exascale supercomputers, the Block-Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement Co-Design Center has released a new version of its software that solves a benchmark problem hundreds of times faster than the original baseline.

Argonne’s Data Science Program Adds New Projects and Doubles in Size

The new project award recipients include an industry-based deep learning project; a national laboratory-based cosmology workflow project; and two university-based projects: one that uses machine-learning for materials discovery, and a deep-learning computer science project.

New Efficient Catalyst for Key Step in Artificial Photosynthesis

Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a new catalyst that speeds up the rate of a key step in “artificial photosynthesis”—an effort to mimic how plants, algae, and some bacteria harness sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into energy-rich fuels.

Benchmarking Computational Methods for Metagenomes

A team including DOE JGI researchers described the results of the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) Challenge, the first-ever, community-organized benchmarking assessment of computational tools for metagenomes.

Software Developed at Brookhaven Lab Could Advance Synchrotron Science Worldwide

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed new software to streamline data acquisition (DAQ) at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Called “Bluesky,” the software significantly eases the process of collecting and comparing data at NSLS-II, and could be used to facilitate scientific collaboration between light sources worldwide.