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New approach accurately determines how electrolytes in water behave, offering insights for energy, synthesis, and medicine

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Man-made pollution in eastern China’s cities worsens when less dust blows in from the Gobi Desert, according to a new study. That’s because dust plays an important role in determining the air temperatures and thereby promoting winds to blow away man-made pollution. Less dust means the air stagnates, with man-made pollution sticking around longer.

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For the first time, researchers have measured the force that draws tiny crystals together and visualized how they swivel and align. Called van der Waals forces, the attraction provides insights into how crystals self-assemble, an activity that occurs in a wide range of cases in nature, from rocks to shells to bones.

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PNNL researchers have created a unique video that shows oxygen bubbles inflating and later deflating inside a tiny lithium-air battery. The knowledge gained from the video could help make lithium-air batteries that are more compact, stable and can hold onto a charge longer.

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is collaborating with three small businesses to address technical challenges concerning hydrogen for fuel cell cars, bio-coal and nanomaterial manufacturing.

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High performance computing researcher Shuaiwen Leon Song asked if hardware called 3D stacked memory could do something it was never designed to do—help render 3D graphics.

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When water comes in for a landing on the common catalyst titanium oxide, it splits into hydroxyls just under half the time. Water's oxygen and hydrogen atoms shift back and forth between existing as water or hydroxyls, and water has the slightest advantage, like the score in a highly competitive tennis game.

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Scientists have developed a new system to convert methane into a deep green, energy-rich, gelatin-like substance that can be used as the basis for biofuels and other bioproducts, specialty chemicals – and even feed for cows that create the gas in the first place.

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Scientists built a new device that shows what happens when electrode, electrolyte, and active materials meet in energy storage technologies.

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New research shows adding a pinch of chemical additive to a lithium-metal battery’s electrolyte helps make rechargeable batteries that are stable, charge quickly, and go longer in between charges.

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Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that a complex with a proton pathway and stabilized by outer coordination sphere interactions is reversible for hydrogen production/oxidation at room temperature and pressure.

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Two scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will become members of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering.

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Patients with inflammatory bowel disease are more likely to see dramatic shifts in the make-up of the community of microbes in their gut than healthy people, according to a study published in Nature Microbiology. The results help physicians understand the disease more fully and potentially offer new ways to track the disease and monitor patients.

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In the microbial world, vitamin B12 is a hot commodity. It turns out that vitamin B12, a substance produced by only a few organisms but needed by nearly all of them, wields great power in microbial communities – ubiquitous structures that affect energy and food production, the environment, and human health.

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To create more efficient catalysts, scientists would like to start with porous materials with controlled atomic-scale structures as random defects can hamper performance. A team created a one-pot method that produces the structures.

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Using a natural catalyst from bacteria for inspiration, researchers have now reported the fastest synthetic catalysts to date for hydrogen production-- producing 45 million hydrogen molecules per second.

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Scientists discovered a new material that absorbs visible light to generate electricity; this material might be useful for splitting water to produce a combustible fuel, hydrogen.

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A new streamlined process could quickly pare down heaps of algae species into just a few that hold the most promise for making biofuel.

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An analysis of the strongest tropical storms over the last half-century reveals that higher global temperatures have intensified the storms via enhanced rainfall. Rain that falls on the ocean reduces salinity and allows typhoons to grow stronger.

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Scientists have witnessed the birth of atmospheric ice clouds, creating ice cloud crystals in the laboratory and then taking images of the process through a microscope, essentially documenting the very first steps of cloud formation.

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Alain Bonneville, a geophysicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, will present details on the muon detector and the comparative field tests at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. His talk is Thursday, December 15, 2016 at 5:40 p.m. in Moscone South, Room 307.Muons, once used to explore the inside of pyramids and volcanoes alike, are enabling researchers to see deep underground with a technological breakthrough from PNNL.

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PNNL and Oregon State University are part of the newest institute under the Manufacturing USA Initiative. PNNL and OSU will co-lead the Module and Component Manufacturing Focus Area for the institute.

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RICHLAND, Wash. – Water has many unusual properties, such as its solid form, ice, being able to float in liquid water, and they get weirder below its freezing point. Supercooled water — below freezing but still a liquid — is notoriously difficult to study. Some researchers thought supercooled water behaved oddly within a particularly cold range, snapping from a liquid into a solid, instantaneously crystallizing at a particular temperature like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

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Oil spills could be cleaned up in the icy, rough waters of the Arctic with a chemically modified sawdust material that absorbs up to five times its weight in oil and stays afloat for at least four months.

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Evangelina Galvan Shreeve has been named PNNL’s new director of STEM Education and Outreach.

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PNNL is supporting today’s announcement by the White House about efforts related to soil sustainability by sponsoring research projects through two research initiatives with funding of $20 million. The research involves a range of diverse projects looking at soil’s role in Earth’s climate, the environment, food and fuel production.

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A new study predicts that warming temperatures will contribute to the release into the atmosphere of carbon that has long been locked up securely in the coldest reaches of our planet.Soil and climate expert Katherine Todd-Brown of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is an author of the study, which was led by researchers at Yale.

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Intense storms have become more frequent and longer-lasting in the Great Plains and Midwest in the last 35 years. What has fueled these storms? The temperature difference between the Southern Great Plains and the Atlantic Ocean produces winds that carry moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Plains, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

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Tools that track underground contaminants and speed carbon capture technology development are among R&D Magazine’s 100 most innovative scientific breakthroughs of the year.

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RICHLAND, Wash. – It may sound like science fiction, but wastewater treatment plants across the United States may one day turn ordinary sewage into biocrude oil, thanks to new research at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.The technology, hydrothermal liquefaction, mimics the geological conditions the Earth uses to create crude oil, using high pressure and temperature to achieve in minutes something that takes Mother Nature millions of years.

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The state's three largest public research institutions have signed a Memorandum of Understanding, which expresses the intent of the parties to increase research collaborations on complex challenges and provide additional research and training opportunities for students in the state. The memorandum was signed recently by leaders at the University of Washington, Washington State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

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Microbes have a remarkable ability to adapt to the extreme conditions in fracking wells. New finding help scientists understand what is happening inside fracking wells and could offer insight into processes such as corrosion and methane production.

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A better understanding of how bacteria fix nitrogen gas into nitrogen-carrying ammonia could lead to energy savings in industrial processes. Researchers are studying the bacterial enzyme that does this, a complicated enzyme called nitrogenase. In new work, researchers discovered that the two sides of nitrogenase cooperate in producing ammonia, alternating through different steps in a way that makes efficient use of the complex enzyme.

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A self-powered fish-tracking tag uses a flexible strip containing piezoelectric materials to emit tiny beeps that are recorded by underwater microphones. The device is designed for longer-living fish such as sturgeon, eels and lamprey.

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Extremely complex plutonium has ties to energy and security. Scientists from Pacific Northwest National Lab and Washington State University found that plutonium's behavior, in plutonium tetrafluoride, can be attributed to atoms hoarding electrons

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A PNNL expert on rock chemistry and microbial life is part of a team investigating whether there has ever been life on Mars. Sherry Cady’s expertise ferreting out signs of ancient life on early Earth will help scientists decide which rock samples from the red planet to analyze.

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Johannes Lercher, Director of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Institute for Integrated Catalysis, was chosen for the first David Trim and Noel Cant Lectureship sponsored by the Catalysis Society of Australia.

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Mayenite is one smart cement -- it can be turned from an insulator to a transparent conductor and back. It is also suitable for use as semiconductors in flat panel displays. The secret behind mayenite's magic is a tiny change in its chemical composition. In new work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show how components called electron anions help to transform crystalline mayenite, also called C12A7, into semiconducting glass.

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Hitching a ride on fatty molecules, a "sticky" strategy shields sugary molecules from their soluble nature, and may explain the discrepancies between models and actual measurements of sea spray aerosol composition.

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The August 2016 issue of the Institute for Integrated Catalysis' Transformations highlights in catalysis.

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Helping fish migrate past dams could cost a fraction of conventional fish ladders with the help of PNNL’s upcoming study of Whooshh Innovations’ so-called Salmon Cannon.

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.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.

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Led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, scientists conducted a collaborative study that answered foundational questions about how nature influences the composition of aerosols. The team's findings could help avoid unintended consequences in both regulations and remediation.

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PNNL scientists have untangled a soil metagenome – all the genetic material recovered from a sample of soil – more fully than ever before, reconstructing portions of the genomes of 129 species of microbes. While it’s only a tiny proportion of the species in the sample, it’s a leap forward for scientists who have had only a fraction of that success to date.

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While relentless bright light brings many forms of cyanobacteria to their knees – figuratively, of course – Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 does the opposite, thriving and growing at a rate that far outpaces most of its peers. Now researchers know why: It triples in size to accommodate a rapid expansion of the cellular machinery it uses to build proteins.

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The PNNL-led Battery500 consortium aims to significantly improve upon the batteries that power today’s electric vehicles by nearly tripling the specific energy in lithium batteries.

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Materials scientists have created a new material that performs like a cell membrane found in nature. Such a material has long been sought for applications as varied as water purification and drug delivery. The material can assemble itself into a sheet thinner but stabler than a soap bubble, the researchers report July 12 in Nature Communications.

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PNNL's "Dream Team" has been selected to lead one of four new Energy Frontier Research Centers to accelerate scientific breakthroughs needed to support the Department of Energy's cleanup mission.

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A free, web-based tool developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory estimates the emissions impacts associated for companies considering adopting various smart grid technologies.