X-Ray Experiments Suggest High Tunability of 2-D Material
Researchers used MAESTRO, an X-ray platform at Berkeley Lab, to zero in on signatures of exotic electronic behavior in a 2-D material. They found that the material may be highly tunable, with potential applications in spintronics and other emerging fields.
Tiny Particles Have Outsize Impact on Storm Clouds, Precipitation
Tiny particles fuel powerful storms and influence weather much more than has been appreciated, according to a study in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science. The tiny pollutants - long considered too small to have much impact on droplet formation - are, in effect, diminutive downpour-makers.
Recycling and Reusing Worn Cathodes to Make New Lithium Ion Batteries
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an energy-efficient recycling process that restores used cathodes from spent lithium ion batteries and makes them work just as good as new. The process involves harvesting the degraded cathode particles from a used battery and then boiling and heat treating them. Researchers built new batteries using the regenerated cathodes. Charge storage capacity, charging time and battery lifetime were all restored to their original levels.
New Discovery Could Improve Organic Solar Cell Performance
Scientists who are members of a new energy materials-related science center based at Berkeley Lab have solved a mystery that could lead to gains in efficiency for organic solar cells.
Advances in Lasers Get to the Long and Short of It
Chiral nematic liquid crystals are an emerging class of lasing devices that are poised to shape how lasers are used in the future. New work on how to select band-edge modes in these devices, which determine the lasing energy, may shine light on how lasers of the future will be tuned, and researchers have demonstrated a technique that allows the laser to electrically switch emission between the long- and short-wavelength edges of the photonic bandgap. They report their work this week in Applied Physics Letters.
Rutgers Scientists Discover 'Legos of Life'
Rutgers scientists have found the "Legos of life" - four core chemical structures that can be stacked together to build the myriad proteins inside every organism - after smashing and dissecting nearly 10,000 proteins to understand their component parts. The four building blocks make energy available for humans and all other living organisms, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Small Hydroelectric Dams Increase Globally with Little Research, Regulations
University of Washington researchers have published the first major assessment of small hydropower dams around the world -- including their potential for growth -- and highlight the incredibly variability in how dams of varying sizes are categorized, regulated and studied.
Researchers Reveal How Microbes Cope in Phosphorus-Deficient Tropical Soil
A team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has uncovered how certain soil microbes cope in a phosphorus-poor environment to survive in a tropical ecosystem. Their novel approach could be applied in other ecosystems to study various nutrient limitations and inform agriculture and terrestrial biosphere modeling.
Scientists Discover Material Ideal for Smart Photovoltaic Windows
Researchers at Berkeley Lab discovered that a form of perovskite, one of the hottest materials in solar research due to its high conversion efficiency, works surprisingly well as a stable and photoactive semiconductor material that can be reversibly switched between a transparent state and a non-transparent state, without degrading its electronic properties.
Biofuels Feedstock Study Supports Billion-Ton Estimate
Can farmers produce at least 1 billion tons of biomass per year that can be used as biofuels feedstock? The answer is yes.
On the Rebound
New research from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and Stanford University has found that palladium nanoparticles can repair atomic dislocations in their crystal structure, potentially leading to other advances in material science.
Coupling Experiments to Theory to Build a Better Battery
A Berkeley Lab-led team of researchers has reported that a new lithium-sulfur battery component allows a doubling in capacity compared to a conventional lithium-sulfur battery, even after more than 100 charge cycles.
DRIFTing to Fast, Precise Data
Non-destructive technique identifies key variations in Alaskan soils, quickly providing insights into carbon levels.
A Shortcut to Modeling Sickle Cell Disease
Using Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputer, a team led by Brown University's George Karniadakis devised a multiscale model of sickle cell disease that captures what happens inside a red blood cell affected by the disease.
Remotely Predicting Leaf Age in Tropical Forests
New approach offers data across species, sites, and canopies, providing insights into carbon uptake by forests.
Conservation Mind Game
A new study led by Kathryn Caldwell, an assistant professor of psychology at Ithaca College, demonstrates that homeowners can be encouraged to make changes to their energy use with a simple education plan and some helpful tricks from the world of social psychology.
X-Rays Reveal 'Handedness' in Swirling Electric Vortices
Scientists used spiraling X-rays at Berkeley Lab to observe, for the first time, a property that gives left- or right-handedness to swirling electric patterns - dubbed polar vortices - in a layered material called a superlattice.
Breaking Bad Metals with Neutrons
By combining the latest developments in neutron scattering and theory, researchers are close to predicting phenomena like superconductivity and magnetism in strongly correlated electron systems. It is likely that the next advances in superconductivity and magnetism will come from such systems, but they might also be used in completely new ways such as quantum computing.
ORNL Researchers Use Titan to Accelerate Design, Training of Deep Learning Networks
For deep learning to be effective, existing neural networks to be modified, or novel networks designed and then "trained" so that they know precisely what to look for and can produce valid results. This is a time-consuming and difficult task, but one that a team of ORNL researchers recently demonstrated can be dramatically expedited with a capable computing system.
Dark Energy Survey Publicly Releases First Three Years of Data
At a special session held during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., scientists on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) announced today the public release of their first three years of data. This first major release of data from the Survey includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects, including distant galaxies billions of light-years away as well as stars in our own galaxy.
Ingredients for Life Revealed in Meteorites That Fell to Earth
A detailed study of blue salt crystals found in two meteorites that crashed to Earth - which included X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab - found that they contain both liquid water and a mix of complex organic compounds including hydrocarbons and amino acids.
Rewritable Wires Could Mean No More Obsolete Circuitry
An electric field switches the conductivity on and off in atomic-scale channels, which could allow for upgrades at will.
Research Outlines the Interconnected Benefits of Urban Agriculture
a team of researchers led by Arizona State University and Google has assessed the value of urban agriculture and quantified its benefits at global scale. They report their findings in "A Global Geospatial Ecosystems Services Estimate of Urban Agriculture," in the current issue of Earth's Future.
Filtering Water Better than Nature
Water passes through human-made straws faster than the "gold standard" protein, allowing us to filter seawater.
Machine Learning Provides a Bridge to the Texture of the Quantum World
Machine learning and neural networks are the foundation of artificial intelligence and image recognition, but now they offer a bridge to see and recognize exotic insulating phases in quantum materials.