X-Ray Research on Short-Lived Isotope Provides New Possibilities for Cancer Treatment
A recent paper published in Nature Communications reveals insights about the element actinium that could support new classes of anticancer drugs. The experiment was conducted by the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with the DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
How to Keep the Superhot Plasma Inside Tokamaks From Chirping
Physicists have learned which conditions within fusion plasma make the occurrence of chirping modes more likely.
A New Way to Display the 3-D Structure of Molecules
Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley researchers have developed nanoscale display cases that enables new atomic-scale views of hard-to-study chemical and biological samples.
Scientists Uncover the Origin of High-Temperature Superconductivity in Copper-Oxide Compound
Brookhaven physicist Ivan Bozovic and his team have an explanation for why certain materials can conduct electricity without resistance at temperatures well above those required by conventional superconductors.
Unveiled: Earth's Viral Diversity
Plumbing the Earth's microbial diversity requires learning more about poorly-studied relationships between microbes and the viruses that infect them, impacting how they regulate global cycles. Using the world's largest collection of assembled metagenomic datasets, DOE JGI researchers uncovered over 125,000 partial and complete viral genomes.
Annual Wind Power Market Report Confirms Technology Advancements, Improved Project Performance, and Low Wind Energy Prices
Wind energy pricing remains attractive to utility and commercial purchasers, according to an annual report released by the U.S. Department of Energy and prepared by the Electricity Markets & Policy Group at Berkeley Lab. Prices offered by newly built wind projects are averaging around 2 cents/kWh, driven lower by technology advancements and cost reductions.
Local Wind Powering More U.S. Companies
.American companies are increasingly making their own power - and sales - with wind turbines located near the factories and buildings that consume the power they make, concludes PNNL's 2015 Distributed Wind Market Report.
Critical Materials Institute, Oddello Industries Pursue Recovery of Rare-Earth Magnets From Used Hard Drives
A process for large-scale recovery of rare earth magnets from used computer hard drives will undergo industrial testing under a new agreement between Oddello Industries LLC and ORNL, as part of the Department of Energy's Critical Materials Institute.
Big PanDA Tackles Big Data for Physics and Other Future Extreme Scale Scientific Applications
A team of physicists just received $2.1 million in funding for 2016-2017 from DOE's Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program to enhance a "workload management system" for handling the ever-increasing data demands of two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and expanding its use as a general workload management service for a Department of Energy supercomputer.
Expanding the Stable of Workhorse Yeasts
So far industry has only harnessed a fraction of the yeast diversity available for biotechnological applications, including biofuel production. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers aims to help boost the use of a wider range of yeasts.
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New Material Discovery Allows Study of Elusive Weyl Fermion
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have discovered a new type of Weyl semimetal, a material that opens the way for further study of Weyl fermions, a type of massless elementary particle hypothesized by high-energy particle theory and potentially useful for creating high-speed electronic circuits and quantum computers.
New Residential Water Heater Concept Promises High Efficiency, Lower Cost
Scientists from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Florida has developed a novel method that could yield lower-cost, higher-efficiency systems for water heating in residential buildings.
SLAC, Stanford Gadget Grabs More Solar Energy to Disinfect Water Faster
Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a nanostructured device, about half the size of a postage stamp, that disinfects water much faster than the UV method by also making use of the visible part of the solar spectrum, which contains 50 percent of the sun's energy.
Fermi Researchers Explore New Ways of Searching for Dark Matter
Researchers working with more than six years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have used novel approaches to search for cosmic signals that could reveal what mysterious dark matter is made of. The scientists looked for hypothetical axion particles, studied the gamma-ray emissions from a large satellite galaxy of our Milky Way and analyzed the faint glow of gamma rays that covers the entire sky.
3-D Galaxy-mapping Project Enters Construction Phase
A 3-D sky-mapping project that will measure the light of millions of galaxies and explore the nature of dark energy has received approval to move forward with construction.
New Results on the Higgs Boson and the Building Blocks of Matter Presented at ICHEP
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performance surpasses expectations; results confirm the Higgs particle, show "bump" appears to be a statistical fluctuation, and offer insight into quark-gluon plasma at high energies complementary to those explored at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
NOvA Shines New Light on How Neutrinos Behave
Scientists from the NOvA collaboration have announced an exciting new result that could improve our understanding of the behavior of neutrinos.
Smarter Self-Assembly Opens New Pathways for Nanotechnology
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a way to direct the self-assembly of multiple molecular patterns within a single material, producing new nanoscale architectures. This is a significant conceptual leap in self-assembly that could change the way we design and manufacture electronics.
Argonne Discovery Yields Self-Healing Diamond-Like Carbon
A group of tribologists - scientists who study the effect of friction in machines - and computational materials scientists at Argonne recently discovered a revolutionary diamond-like film that is generated by the heat and pressure of an automotive engine. The discovery of this ultra-durable, self-lubricating tribofilm - a film that forms between moving surfaces - was first reported yesterday in the journal Nature. It could have profound implications for the efficiency and durability of future engines and other moving metal parts that can be made to develop self-healing, diamond-like carbon tribofilms.
New X-Ray Microscopy Technique Images Nanoscale Workings of Rechargeable Batteries
An X-ray microscopy technique recently developed at Berkeley Lab has given scientists the ability to image nanoscale changes inside lithium-ion battery particles as they charge and discharge. The real-time images provide a new way to learn how batteries work, and how to improve them.
Stanford-Led Team Reveals Nanoscale Secrets of Rechargeable Batteries
An interdisciplinary team has developed a way to track how particles charge and discharge at the nanoscale, an advance that will lead to better batteries for all sorts of mobile applications.
ORNL Optimizes Formula for Cadmium-Tellurium Solar Cells
Solar cells based on cadmium and tellurium could move closer to theoretical levels of efficiency because of some sleuthing by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Story Tips From the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, August 2016
ORNL's PenDoc combines mass spectrometry with direct sampling to identify materials in seconds; ORNL study providing watershed-scale understanding of mercury in soils and sediments; Salt, ammonia key ingredients of high-efficiency heating system; ORNL taking closer look at microscopic soot particles, advanced combustion engines; Steel-concrete storage vessel may be ticket to clearing path for hydrogen-powered vehicles; Study examines climate change, power demands; ORNL gains better understanding of how defects in complex oxides alter behavior; Natural barrier stores carbon underground longer than previously thought.
Scientists Model The "Flicker" of Gluons in Subatomic Smashups
A new study just published in Physical Review Letters reveals that a high degree of gluon fluctuation--a kind of flickering rearrangement in the distribution of gluon density within individual protons--could help explain some of the remarkable results at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- and also in nuclear physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe.
New Silicon Structures Could Make Better Biointerfaces
A team of researchers have engineered silicon particles one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, which could lead to "biointerface" systems designed to make nerve cells fire and heart cells beat.