Feature Channels: Energy

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Argonne scientists are studying the environmental and economic impact of plastic bottles using mechanical, chemical and upcycling recycling approaches.

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Weight regains is a common problem for weight loss individuals. A number of studies have shown that weight loss in overweight people results in a reduction in whole-body energy expenditure. This reduction in energy expenditure is disproportionate across tissues, known as energetic mismatch which primarily originates from lean tissue, thus increasing weight regain risk.

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Argonne and DOE pose a fun new series of challenges to students interested in developing critical cybersecurity skills.

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Can the nuclear industry use extended reality tools to improve digital operations and maintenance? Engineers at Argonne’s Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility investigate.

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Marm Dixit, a Weinberg Distinguished Staff Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the 2023 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award.

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A tiny biobattery that could still work after 100 years has been developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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Scrap aluminum can now be collected and transformed directly into new vehicle parts using an innovative process being developed by the automotive industry, in particular for electric vehicles.

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DOE Office of Science officials, Gov. Pritzker and other local legislators joined international partners and collaborators and at Fermilab for the opening of two new buildings and the groundbreaking of another to usher in a new era of science.

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Determined to combat climate change and promote sustainability, the CSU progresses toward the goal of being carbon neutral by 2045.

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Zhonghou Cai is the 2023 recipient of the Gopal K. Shenoy Excellence in Beamline Science Award. The annual award recognizes active beamline scientists at the Advanced Photon Source for significant contributions to research or instrumentation and support of the beamline user community.

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Marm Dixit, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was named the 2023 recipient of the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award given by the Advanced Photon Source user organization which recognizes important scientific or technical accomplishments at the facility by a young investigator.

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To transform the way we commute and live, the University of Miami College of Engineering launched the Miami Engineering Autonomous Mobility Initiative (MEAMI), a consortium of world-class academic, industry, and government partners.

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A parabolic dish on the EPFL campus is easily overlooked, resembling a satellite dish or other telecommunications infrastructure.

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The Advanced Photon Source is about to undergo a comprehensive upgrade, one that will require a one-year pause in operations. When the APS returns to operation in 2024, its brighter X-ray beams will lead to new breakthroughs in many different areas for decades to come.

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To accelerate development of useful new materials, researchers at Berkeley Lab are building a new kind of automated lab that uses robots guided by artificial intelligence. A-Lab will rapidly test whether materials that have been computationally predicted can be made in reality. The lab’s vision is to use AI to discover materials of the future, starting with a focus on materials for batteries and energy storage.

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Today’s electric vehicles can drive about 300 miles per charge. Lithium-sulfur batteries have the potential for a driving range of more than 400 miles with practical capacities of up to 500 watt-hours per kilogram at the pack level, twice that of lithium-ion batteries. That has made it a prime target for researchers.

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The Virginia Tech media relations office has the following experts available for interviews surrounding the environment, energy, and sustainability. To schedule an interview, please contact [email protected]. Rising seas threatens U.S. coastlines and cities A recently released report from the U.N. on climate change found that rising sea levels are "unavoidable for centuries to millennia due to continuing deep ocean warming and ice sheet melt, and sea levels will remain elevated for thousands of years.

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Artificial intelligence’s rapid growth has led to advancements like autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, and ChatGPT. But AI technologies and the training of AI models require a lot of energy, increasing concerns about the environmental impact of AI and its sustainability. To put AI’s energy usage into perspective: it took nine days to train one of OpenAI’s early model chatbots known as MegatronLM.

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PPPL hosted a workshop on fusion energy and nuclear nonproliferation at Princeton University on Jan. 25 and 26. Participants included representatives from government, national laboratories, Princeton University, other academic institutions, and private fusion developers.

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The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

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Newcastle University researchers have created environmentally-friendly, high-efficiency photovoltaic cells that harness ambient light to power internet of Things (IoT) devices.

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In ideal manufacturing, 3D printing reduces waste, uses less energy and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions. An entrepreneur and scientist at Argonne National Laboratory are working together to make this future ideal a reality.

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The SLAC-Stanford team pulled hydrogen directly from ocean waters. Their work could help efforts to generate low-carbon fuel for electric grids, cars, boats and other infrastructure.

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The demand for battery-grade lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and platinum will climb steeply as vehicle electrification speeds up and nations work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through mid-century. This surge in demand will also create a variety of economic and supply-chain problems, according to new Cornell University research published in Nature Communications.

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed an online resource to help consumers understand the electric vehicle tax credits available through the Inflation Reduction Act.

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As a Distinguished Staff Fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division focused on energy storage and conversion, Andrew Ullman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory is using chemistry to devise a better battery.

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The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Kim, Byung-suk) has been participating as Korea’s representative organization in the Energy in Buildings and Communities (EBC) programme, an Technical Cooperation Programme under the International Energy Agency (IEA), since 2005.

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Three engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have invented a fabric that concludes the 80-year quest to make a synthetic textile modeled on Polar bear fur.

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The Board of Directors of Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA) has named theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett as the next director of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and BSA president. BSA, a partnership between Stony Brook University (SBU) and Battelle, manages and operates Brookhaven Lab for DOE's Office of Science.

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The United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) newly appointed director, theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett, will be joining Stony Brook University as a tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. Hewett is the first female director to lead BNL.

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Mechanical and aerospace engineering faculty at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) have won a pair of research awards totaling $750,000 to collaborate with the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) on research to advance knowledge toward one of the most sought-after goals of plasma physics, plasma fusion energy. This project marks the first experimental collaboration between the university and the LANL, helping to bring fusion and high energy density (HED) plasma research to UAH, a part of The University of Alabama System.

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Researchers at Binghamton University led research partnering with the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)—a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory—to get a better look at how peroxides on the surface of copper oxide promote the oxidation of hydrogen but inhibit the oxidation of carbon monoxide, allowing them to steer oxidation reactions.

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In an advance they consider a breakthrough in computational chemistry research, University of Wisconsin–Madison chemical engineers have developed model of how catalytic reactions work at the atomic scale.

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Argonne is partnering with Brookhaven National Laboratory and University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras to engage students who are largely underrepresented in the atmospheric and Earth system sciences workforce.

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Idaho National Laboratory’s software marketplace is officially open for business. 

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Sandia National Laboratories Senior Scientist Stan Atcitty has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one of the world’s largest technical professional organizations. Atcitty’s research focuses on power electronics needed to integrate energy storage and distributed generation with the electric utility grid.

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Researchers from the National University of Singapore have discovered a new single-element ferroelectric material that alters the current understanding of conventional ferroelectric materials and has future applications in data storage devices.

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About 12% of the total global energy demand comes from heating and cooling homes and businesses. A new study suggests that using underground water to maintain comfortable temperatures could reduce consumption of natural gas and electricity in this sector by 40% in the U.S. The approach, called aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES), could also help prevent blackouts caused by high power demand during extreme weather events.

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Argonne researchers have used a cutting-edge X-ray technique to view the movements of components inside an operating battery cell. The study is one of the first times that such movements have been directly observed at the scale of a millionth of a meter.

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The research team led by Drs. Ung Lee and Da Hye Won at the Clean Energy Research Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Seok Jin Yoon), announced that they succeeded in developing a process for producing high-value-added synthesis gas (syngas) by direct electrochemical conversion of CO2 captured using a liquid absorbent.

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PNNL-developed catalytic process and catalyst to upgrade ethanol to sustainable aviation fuel wins American Chemical Society award.

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In certain molecules, the so-called photoacids, a proton can be released locally by excitation with light. There is a sudden change in the pH value in the solution – a kind of fast switch that is important for many chemical and biological processes.

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Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are helping modernize power management and enhance reliability in an increasingly complex electric grid.