The Department of Energy (DOE) today awarded $2.1 million across 9 collaborative projects between DOE national laboratories and private industry aimed at overcoming challenges in fusion energy development.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today awarded $45.5 million for research projects geared towards understanding and harnessing nature’s biological processes to produce clean biofuels and bioproducts.
Phosphorus is a building block of all living cells. Most phosphorous occurs in the form of phosphate, but ancient oceans and soils also contained another form, phosphite. Microbes gain energy by converting phosphite to phosphate via phosphorous reduction-oxidation (redox) cycling. A new study suggests that the ability to use phosphite in energy metabolism is surprisingly widespread in nature.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $93 million in funding for 71 research projects that will spur new discoveries in High Energy Physics.
To advance effective public communication of basic science, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and The Kavli Foundation’s Science Public Engagement Partnership (SciPEP) will host a virtual conference on why and how scientists and science communicators connect with the broader public around discovery science.
Particle physics peers into the mysteries of our cosmos while opening the door to future technologies. Research into the Higgs boson, dark energy, and quantum physics reveals insights into the universe and enables innovation in other fields.
Mary Dunlop leads a team at Boston University that uses multi-disciplinary approaches to improve the amount of biofuel that certain microbes can produce. These microbes can produce replacements for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded over $2.85 million with a focus on broadening and diversifying the nuclear and particle physics research communities through research traineeships for undergraduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority Serving Institutions.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $22 million in funding for nine projects covering a range of energy research topics from grid integration, solar energy, wind energy, and advanced manufacturing.
The Oak Ridge Reservation is contaminated with acidic, high-nitrate-and high-metal substances. Microbes in this environment can use molybdenum to remove nitrate, but the low concentration of molybdenum at Oak Ridge limits how much nitrate the microbes can remove. Two studies examine why molybdenum is limited and the mechanisms some microbes use to survive these conditions.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $28.9 million in funding for nine research projects to advance the development of sophisticated software for the chemical sciences.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued a call for nominations for the 2021 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, one of the longest running and most prestigious science and technology awards given by the U.S. Government.
Leaf-cutter ants tend fungal gardens that convert lipids in leaves into lipids the ants can use for energy, building cells, and communication between organisms. New research has found that different regions of the ants’ fungal gardens were enriched with different lipids. This helps scientists understand communications between organisms in different kingdoms of life.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $4 million in funding for 10 awards across 5 efforts to advance R&D for isotope production. This funding is part of a key federal program that produces critical isotopes otherwise unavailable or in short supply for U.S. science, medicine, and industry.
Scientists have found that lithium vanadium oxide can rapidly charge and discharge energy. The material has a structure similar to table salt but with a more random atomic arrangement. It charges and discharges without growing lithium metal “dendrites” that can cause dangerous short circuits. This could lead to safer, faster-charging batteries for electric vehicles.
Meant to foster innovation, the Department of Energy Office of Science’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program has supported the development of a number of technologies, including the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing process.
Creating an efficient fusion plasma in a tokamak requires a plasma with an extremely hot core but edges cool enough to protect the tokomak walls. Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility developed a solution that uses the active injection of gases to cool the edge coupled with enhanced core confinement.
: The soil surrounding and including the roots of plants is a hotspot for bacteria that help plants resist infections, survive drought, and take up nutrients. However, scientists did not fully understand how bacteria assist plants. A new study provides new insights into the spots on roots where bacteria attach. This could help scientists understand and control how plants and bacteria interact.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $3.5 million for 23 collaborative research projects in high energy physics that involve substantial collaboration with Japanese investigators.
As the Deputy Group Leader of the Nuclear Data and Theory Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sofia Quaglioni is contributing to a unified understanding of the structure and lower-energy reactions of light nuclei.
Soot in the atmosphere absorbs sunlight, warming the Earth’s atmosphere. This analysis shows that soot particles’ shape and composition can vary significantly. This creates discrepancies between real-world observations and predictions from models. This research used measurement and modeling to provide a framework that explains variation in atmospheric soot.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced 235 small businesses, across 42 states, will receive $54 million in critical seed funding for 266 projects that are developing and deploying proof-of-concept prototypes for a wide range of technological solutions needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
: Plants synthesize thousands of metabolites that help them adapt to their environments. Mass spectrometry can detect and measure metabolites in a sample, but this is difficult with complex samples. One solution is to add labeled chemicals to a sample. This research developed an easy-to-use computational tool that locates labeled chemicals, simplifying analysis.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $6.4 million in funding for U.S. scientists to carry out seven research projects at two major fusion energy facilities located in Germany and Japan.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $1 million for collaborations in privacy-preserving artificial intelligence research. The aim of this funding is to bring together researchers from the DOE National Laboratories and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to jointly develop new flagship datasets and privacy-preserving methods and algorithms to improve healthcare.
A machine learning system is helping operators resolve routine faults at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The system monitors the accelerator cavities, where faults can trip off the CEBAF. The system identified which cavities were tripping off about 85% of the time and identified the type of fault about 78% of the time.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of 32 outstanding undergraduate and graduate students across the nation to receive the prestigious DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, jointly managed by the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $2 million in new funding to support translational research and development (R&D) of novel, medically relevant isotopes to accelerate evaluation for usage in pre-clinical and clinical trials.
Scientists don’t know how exotic hadrons with a larger number of quarks are structured—are they tightly bound hadrons or a compound of two hadrons similar to molecules? Now, scientists have developed a new technique to identify the nature of the χc1(3872, a four-quark hadron. This is the first time scientists have discovered the structure of a particle by observing how it interacts with nearby particles.
Ananth Kalyanaraman is a professor and the Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Science at Washington State University. His focus is on developing scaling algorithms and software for analyzing large-scale biological and network data.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the selection of 83 scientists who will receive a total of $100 million in funding through its Early Career Research Program.
Scientific rules about “chiral symmetry” predict the existence of subatomic particles called pions. The lifetime of a neutrally charged pion is tied to breaking of chiral symmetry. Until recently, measurements of this lifetime have been much less precise than calculations from theory. Physicists have now measured a pion’s lifetime more precisely than ever before.
A new analysis of collisions of gold ions shows signs of a “critical point,” a change in the way one form of matter changes into another. The results hint at changes in the type of transition during the shift from particles to the quark-and-gluon “soup” that filled the early universe. This helps scientists understand how particles interact and what holds them together.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced that the student team from North Hollywood Senior High School in North Hollywood, California won the 2021 DOE National Science Bowl® (NSB). In the middle school competition, students from Jonas Clarke Middle School in Lexington, Massachusetts took home first place earlier this month.
Supercomputer programmer Seth Johnson might be the ultimate insider at the National Science Bowl® competitions. He competed on his high school NSB team and now volunteers at the regional and national events.
Some meteorites contain microscopic grains of stardust created by nucleosynthesis before our solar system existed. Many grains contain sulfur isotopes that are clues to the grains’ origins in novae and supernovae. Sulfur production from nucleosynthesis depends on the prior production of argon-34. Scientists created and studied argon-34 and established criteria for determining whether particular grains originated in novae or supernovae.
Cooling a 150-million-degree plasma in an orderly and controllable fashion. Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility are studying a new method that uses boron-filled diamond shells to quickly cool fusion plasmas. Early experimental results and computer modeling indicate this method could avoid problems with traditional cooling approaches.
To operate successfully, ITER and future fusion energy reactors cannot allow melting of the walls of the divertor plates that remove excess heat from the plasma in a reactor. These walls are especially at risk of melting when heat is applied to narrow areas. Now, however, an extreme-scale computing analysis indicates that turbulence will reduce that risk.
To understand the effects of expanding biofuel production, scientists must accurately represent biofuel crops in land surface models. Using observations from biofuel plants in the Midwestern United States, researchers simulated two biofuel perennial plants, miscanthus and switchgrass. The simulations indicate these high-yield perennial crops have several advantages over traditional annual bioenergy crops—they assimilate more carbon dioxide, and they require fewer nutrients and less water.
Discretization is the process of converting continuous models and variables, such as wind speed, into discrete versions to make equations that are compatible with computer analysis. Energy consistent discretization ensures that the method does not have any inaccurate sources of energy that can lead to unstable and unrealistic simulations. In this research, scientists provided a discretization for equations used by global models of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Nina Balke is a senior research scientist at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, studying Li-ion batteries to eliminate performance bottlenecks, understand performance fade, and design better batteries from the bottom up.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $10 million for interdisciplinary research in Quantum Information Science (QIS) and nuclear physics.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $17.3 million for college internships, research opportunities, and research projects that connect talented science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students and faculty with the world-class resources at DOE’s National Laboratories.
White-rot fungi have an extraordinary ability to break down lignin, a very sturdy material in plant cell walls. To find out what products result when these fungi deconstruct lignin, researchers used synthetic compounds that mimic those produced by lignin breakdown, fed those compounds to the fungi, then tracked the compounds within fungal cells. They found that white-rot fungi uptake lignin deconstruction products and use them as a carbon source for food and building material.
Wildfires affect both the visible parts of plants and the plant microbiome. Understanding these effects helps scientists mitigate the effects of wildfires. This research examined microbial DNA samples from tissues of young quaking aspen saplings after a prescribed burn. Aspen relies largely on fire to regenerate. This work demonstrates that fire affects the entire plant microbiome, not just nearby soil.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science has selected 78 graduate students representing 26 states for the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program’s 2020 Solicitation 2 cycle.
Researchers have for the first time examined in detail a compound of einsteinium (Es). Einsteinium is one of the synthetic elements and is also the heaviest element currently available for classical chemistry studies. These experimental results chart the path to exploring the fundamental behavior of rare heavy elements and could lead to a new understanding of chemistry across the Periodic Table.
Scientists have found a way to turn X-ray fluorescence into an ultra-high position-sensitive probe to measure nanostructures in thin films. The fluorescence reveals the evolution of nanostructures in real time with nearly atomic-level resolution, something no other technique has achieved. This allows scientists to watch nanostructures in thin films evolve with unprecedented precision and design thin films for new applications.
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $11 million for ten projects in Quantum Information Science (QIS) with relevance to fusion and plasma science.
Research on Earth’s systems can help scientists better understand our planet’s past and future. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science supports work to gather observations, improve models, and feed them into computer simulations.
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