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Plants and algae use green-tinted chlorophyll to convert high-energy sunlight into food via photosynthesis. Some cyanobacteria can survive in deep shade by using infra-red and other low-energy light to photosynthesize. They accomplish this by re-equipping their photosynthetic protein complexes with different kinds of chlorophyll that absorb lower-energy light. Researchers have now determined the molecular structures of these photosynthetic systems to understand how cyanobacteria can use low-energy light.

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Jaime Marian is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, studying irradiation to develop materials and improve fusion reactor designs.

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Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at femtosecond timescales, but measuring the properties of the pulses is challenging. A new approach trains neural networks to analyze the pulses. Starting from low-resolution measurements, the neural networks reveal finer details with each pulse, and they can analyze pulses millions of times faster than previous methods.

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The proton-transfer and ionization process in water leads to the formation of a hydroxyl-hydronium complex, a type of hydroxyl radical. The formation process causes ultrafast structural changes and the redistribution of energy among neighboring water molecules. Thanks to recent developments in liquid phase ultrafast electron diffraction techniques, scientists can capture these processes in real time.

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Halide perovskite can make solar cells a thousand times thinner than today’s silicon solar cells. A new approach allows scientists to watch changes in the material’s structure and functional properties while the material solidifies into a thin film from solution. This gives new insight into how the material’s structure and functionality are related, aiding in future solar cell design.

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Researchers have developed an apparatus to study reactions between gas molecules and highly volatile liquids at the gas-liquid interface with new levels of detail. The apparatus directs a molecular beam onto a flat liquid surface, and when the beam scatters, a detector collects data on the speed, direction, and mass of molecules in the scattered beam. The novel approach will help scientists understand combustion engines, air pollution, and other phenomena.

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Haim Waisman develops computational models of the mechanics of materials. He focuses on fracture phenomena, such as ice breaking due to climate warming, infrastructure aging and deteriorating, energy extraction from rocks, and fractures in biomaterials such as bones.

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Scientists have found a way to “see” inside deuterons, the simplest atomic nuclei, to better understand how particles called gluons are arranged within the deuteron. These collisions can also break the deuteron apart, giving insights into what holds the proton and neutron together. The research helps scientists understand how nuclei emerge from quarks and gluons, and how the masses of nuclei are dynamically generated by gluons.

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For the first time, researchers have used ultrafast electron diffraction to observe a quantum electronic device as it operates. Researchers observed atomic-level changes in the vanadium dioxide switch over millionths of a second, leading to the discovery of a short-lived intermediate state. The results may aid in the development of high-speed, high-efficiency quantum electronics and in the use of pulsed electric fields to create new engineered materials.

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Researchers used neutrons to see how a new aluminum-cerium alloy behaves under high temperatures and pressures inside an operating internal combustion engine. Researchers fitted an AlCe cylinder head to a commercial engine, then used neutron scattering to see inside the AlCe head and the original material engine block in real time before, during, and after the operation of the engine. This method could aid research on advanced alloys for future engines and other systems.

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Roughly half of all flowering plants are polyploid, meaning that they have more than two sets of chromosomes. Scientists believe polyploidy drives adaptation by giving organisms more genetic diversity. This research compared tetraploid (four copies) and octoploid (eight copies) varieties of switchgrass, and found that octoploid switchgrasses are generalists, able to tolerate a broad range of environmental conditions and expand their range into new areas.

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Scientists suggest that water’s so-called “proton quantum effect” may be at the heart of many of the liquid’s strange properties. In this experiment with ultrafast electron diffraction, scientists observed how the hydrogen atoms in water molecules tug and push neighboring molecules when water is excited with laser light. This marks the first time that scientists have directly observed this effect in water.

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To understand how plants respond to environmental stresses, researchers examined the genes regulated by the stress hormone abscisic acid. Specifically, they examined how these genes differ between plants that are sensitive or resistant to high levels of salt in the soil. The study found that stress hormones do not always act as growth inhibiting signals.

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Particle accelerators can be huge, limiting their deployment in industry and science. Researchers have developed a new technique to measure terahertz light in a way that preserves the correlations between position and time. This may pave the way to smaller particle accelerators.

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Physicist Céline Bonfils studies the multiple influences affecting climate change. Her team identified these “fingerprints” in historical climate simulations to help separate the signals from the noise in observations.

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Researchers using monitoring data from Alaska permafrost found that vegetation and the snowpack that accumulates in winter control the temperatures below ground and thus the flow of water in the ground. By highlighting the link between above- and belowground properties and processes, these results will help improve scientists’ predictions of how the Arctic interacts with overall climate change.

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Ferroelectric materials based on the element hafnium show promise for data storage devices. They offer high speed, durability, lower operating power, and the ability to retain data when power is turned off. This research developed an innovative bulk hafnia-based ferroelectric material. Experiments with the material produced the first experimental evidence of room-temperature ferroelectricity in crystals made of a hafnium-based compound, bulk yttrium doped hafnium dioxide.

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The rhizosphere, the underground ecological zone between and around plant roots, is difficult to study. Scientists have now developed a rhizosphere-on-a-chip with a transparent simulated soil structure that allows researchers to view how roots grow over time through the pores in the soil. Paired with specialized mass spectrometry techniques, scientist can also use the rhizosphere-on-a-chip to map the location of root-exuded molecules, like amino acids, without hurting the plant.

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Adding water to the catalytic reaction that converts methane into useful methanol makes the process more effective, but it creates challenges for industry due to steam from the water. Now scientists have identified a common industrial catalyst, copper-zinc oxide, that completes the conversion along different pathways depending on whether water is present or not. This could potentially keep methane, a potent greenhouse gas, out of Earth’s atmosphere and instead turn it into useful products.

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Viruses play an essential role in regulating microbiomes. However, the use of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics have produced taxonomies of only a tiny proportion of the world’s viruses. In this study, researchers used a novel algorithm to compare and incorporate 715,672 metagenome viruses from environmental samples around the world. This expands the viral taxa available to researchers from about 8,000 to 723,672. The scientists then used the data to examine samples from two Populus tree genotypes.

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The international KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany recently reported a new upper limit on the mass of the neutrino. This limit—0.8 electronvolts (eV)—is the lowerst scientists have achieved. As the results are confirmed and refined, they will help scientists better understand the neutrino and its role in the evolution of the universe.

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At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Andreas Kemp studies the interaction of intense, extremely short laser pulses with matter. This new field of research studies extreme nuclear physics reactions at rates far higher than those of current accelerator experiments.

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Fuel cells employ platinum as a catalyst. However, platinum degrades unevenly in fuel cells, resulting in still-usable platinum being discarded. To improve fuel cell durability and reduce waste, this research studied the causes of uneven platinum degradation, producing simple, effective strategies to reduce the waste of precious catalyst material and thereby encouraging the use of fuel cells in vehicles.

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Researchers have created an injectable therapy for spinal cord injuries that uses specially engineered molecules that trigger a healing response in spinal cells. These molecules come together to form tiny fibers in a liquid solution. Scientists can control the motion of these fibers, allowing the fibers to connect more effectively with cells in the spine. The research may lead to a cure for spinal injuries in humans.

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Previous research has found that heat waves and urban heat island effects reinforce each other’s effects. New research developed a method for modeling urban building energy demand and associated heat dispersal during heat waves.

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Heating and cooling for buildings accounted for the United States’ biggest share (41 percent) of energy consumption in 2010, and energy use by buildings amounts to 40 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. A new method allows researchers to test the design of neighborhoods and buildings to understand how they affect local and regional weather and energy use.

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In many streams and rivers, water moves between the open channel and the adjacent groundwater, enabling reactions that can remove or transform carbon, contaminants, and nutrients. Researchers developed a new modeling strategy to represent these effects in watershed-scale models. The new model addresses current models’ limited ability to simulate how carbon, nutrients, and contaminants move and transform in river corridors and allows for a new generation of research on river networks.

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The aboveground portions of plants release particles such as fungal spores, pollen, bacteria, viruses, algae, and cell debris that can act as the nuclei of cloud droplets and ice crystals. A multi-institutional team of researchers has reported the first characterization of biological particles produced over the life cycle of Brachypodium distachyon, a wild but commonly used model grass.

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Nuclear fusion reactions in stars consume carbon-12 to produce oxygen-16, and the resulting ratio of carbon to oxygen shapes a star’s evolution. Physicists have not been able to measure this ratio with precision using existing experimental methods. A new method shines gamma beams on an oxygen-16 target and captures images of the outgoing reaction products to obtain higher-quality data on this reaction.

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Fusion reactors face a challenge called “core-edge integration,” which involves maintaining a plasma that is hot at the core but not too hot to damage reactor walls. New research finds that a previously identified operating regime called Super H-mode can leverage the use of impurities such as nitrogen to address this challenge. The research also indicates that Super-H mode can be scaled up to future fusion plants.