Released: 29-Nov-2014 10:00 AM EST
What's an Artist Doing at Fermi Lab?
Department of Energy, Office of Science

When a revered research institution reaches out to a fine artist to create its first ever artist-in-residency program, we should all sit up and take notice. This month, FermiLab, the celebrated particle physics research laboratory, announced a year-long partnership with artist Lindsay Olson.

Released: 23-Dec-2014 1:00 PM EST
A Standard for Neuroscience Data
Department of Energy, Office of Science

In many science fields—like neuroscience—sharing data isn’t that simple because no standard data format exists.

Released: 26-Jan-2015 3:00 PM EST
Bergan ’15 Named Jefferson Prize Winner
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Will Bergan ’15 got hooked on physics in middle school. He’s done research at two of the world’s premier high-energy physics installations and is the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Prize in Natural Philosophy, William & Mary’s top honor for science and mathematics undergraduates.

Released: 26-Jan-2015 3:00 PM EST
Materials Science and Engineering's Zide Wins AVS Peter Mark Memorial Award
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Joshua Zide, associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Delaware, has won the 2014 Peter Mark Memorial Award from American Vacuum Society, an interdisciplinary society for materials, interface and processing technology. The award recognizes an outstanding young researcher (35 or younger) who has contributed work to AVS publications.

Released: 27-Jan-2015 3:00 PM EST
Paul Canfield Earns Prestigious Humboldt Award to Conduct Research in Germany
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University physicist Paul Canfield has won a Humboldt Fellowship to study fragile magnetic states

Released: 2-Feb-2015 11:10 AM EST
Mines Graduate Student Lands Department of Energy Appointment
Department of Energy, Office of Science

South Dakota School of Mines & Technology Ph.D. candidate Anne-Marie Suriano has been selected to receive the 2015 Science Graduate Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Released: 5-Feb-2015 11:00 AM EST
Tracking Glaciers with Accelerators
Department of Energy, Office of Science

To predict Earth’s future, geologists use particle accelerators to understand its past.

Released: 9-Feb-2015 11:50 AM EST
U.S. Dept. of Energy Awards Louisiana University Scientists $4.9M Statewide Research Grant
Department of Energy, Office of Science

The Louisiana Consortium for Neutron Scattering, or LaCNS, was granted $4.9 million of funding for three years from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Released: 11-Mar-2015 4:05 PM EDT
Rice Physicist Wei Li Named Sloan Fellow
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Rice University physicist Wei Li is among the 126 American and Canadian scholars awarded 2015 Sloan Research Fellowships. The prestigious fellowships, awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, are given to early career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential mark them as rising stars. - See more at: http://news.rice.edu/2015/02/23/rice-physicist-wei-li-named-sloan-fellow-2/#sthash.YuZWm6Ym.dpuf

Released: 7-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
A Potential Rosetta Stone of High Temperature Superconductivity
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Just as the Rosetta Stone has the same message in three different scripts giving scholars insights into ancient languages, so cerium-cobalt-indium5 is offering insights into the interplay between magnetism, superconductivity, and disorder in three classes of unconventional superconductors.

Released: 8-Apr-2015 10:05 AM EDT
ESnet Weathers the Flood of Big Data in Climate Research
Department of Energy, Office of Science

The Energy Sciences Network is the Internet connection you wish you had – and more.

Released: 8-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
Cagey Material Acts as Alcohol Factory at the Molecular Foundry
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Refining natural gas into an easy-to-transport, easy-to-store liquid so far has been a challenge. But now, a new material, designed and patented by researchers working at the Molecular Foundry nanoscience research center, is making this process a little easier

Released: 8-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
OLCF User Earns NVIDIA Award for GPU-Accelerated Earthquake Simulations
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A San Diego Supercomputer Center research team received NVIDIA’s 2015 Global Impact Award for its work, conducted in part on the Titan supercomputer, developing a GPU-accelerated code that simulates high-frequency earthquakes.

Released: 8-Apr-2015 12:05 PM EDT
Clouds Studied Up Close on EMSL Supercomputer, Chinook
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Predicting the types of clouds over the ocean is critical for climate projections. However, current climate models lack the spatial resolution necessary for accurate characterization of certain processes.

Released: 9-Apr-2015 10:05 AM EDT
Multimetal Nanoframes Improve Catalyst Performance
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Scientists built a highly active and durable class of electrocatalysts by exploiting the structural evolution of solid platinum-nickel nanocrystals. The novel material enhanced catalytic activity for splitting oxygen, a reaction vital to fuel cells and potentially other uses.

Released: 9-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
Optimizing Atomic Neighborhoods for Speedier Chemical Reactions
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Scientists discovered that for palladium-nickel catalysts, certain surface characteristics, measured at the atomic level, sped the creation of carbon dioxide from carbon monoxide.

Released: 9-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
Spontaneous Formation of Biomimetic, Nanoporous Membrane Channels
Department of Energy, Office of Science

For the first time, carbon nanotubes were spontaneously inserted into natural and synthetic cell membranes to form pores that mimic biological channels. The pores replicate the major functions of protein-based biological channels.

Released: 10-Apr-2015 12:05 PM EDT
Insulator-to-Metal Transition of Vanadium Dioxide
Department of Energy, Office of Science

When heated to just above room temperature, the electrical conductivity of vanadium dioxide abruptly increases by a factor of 10,000. Unusually large lattice vibrations, which are the oscillations of atoms about their equilibrium positions, stabilize this highly conductive metallic phase.

Released: 10-Apr-2015 12:05 PM EDT
Microbe Produces Ethanol From Switchgrass Without Pretreatment
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Scientists engineered a strain of a consolidated bioprocessing bacterium that breaks down biomass without pretreatment, producing ethanol and demonstrating the successful conversion of switchgrass cellulosic biomass.

Released: 13-Apr-2015 1:05 PM EDT
Competition Not Concentration Matters when Forming Cloud-Influencing Aerosols
Department of Energy, Office of Science

The amount of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) produced from isoprene released by trees as well as the SOA volatility are more accurately tied to interactions with electron-rich, carbon-based chemicals, known as organic peroxy radicals, that compete with nitrogen oxides in reactions.

Released: 14-Apr-2015 1:05 PM EDT
Model Captures How Nitrogen Limitation Affects Hydrological Processes
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the air act as a fertilizer for plants, altering how they use water and interact with the climate. However, an insufficient supply of nitrogen can limit the growth. Scientists adapted the Community Land Model to show how nitrogen limitation affects plant growth.

Released: 10-Apr-2015 8:05 AM EDT
Microbes Disprove Long-Held Assumption that All Organisms Share a Common Vocabulary
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Some microorganisms found in nature and not grown in the laboratory reinterpret the instructions coded into their DNA. Short segments of DNA that signal other organisms to stop adding building blocks or amino acids to a protein are instead interpreted as "add another amino acid."

Released: 10-Apr-2015 9:05 AM EDT
Heat's Role in the Madden-Julian Oscillation
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Tropical monsoons in Indonesia and floods in the United States are both provoked by the Madden-Julian Oscillation, yet, despite its importance, global models often struggle to simulate it accurately. Scientists showed that MJO simulations are most sensitive to lower level heating in the atmosphere.

Released: 15-Apr-2015 9:05 AM EDT
New Mathematical Method Enhances Hydrology Simulations
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Led by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Lab, a team applied sophisticated mathematical solutions to fine tune water and energy exchange parameters, numerical stand-ins for complex processes, to more accurately simulate water and energy fluxes in an important model under different conditions.

Released: 10-Apr-2015 12:05 PM EDT
The New Cool: LSU Physicist Discovers New Material Set to Change Cooling Industry
Department of Energy, Office of Science

New material that may change the way we cool our food, homes and cars

Released: 17-Apr-2015 7:05 AM EDT
Genetics of Wood Formation
Department of Energy, Office of Science

To begin to understand poplar growth, a possible bioenergy crop, scientists at North Carolina State University built a robust high-throughput pipeline for studying the hierarchy of genetic regulation of wood formation using tissue-specific single cells called protoplasts.

Released: 14-Apr-2015 8:05 AM EDT
New Method Relates Greenland Ice Sheet Changes to Sea-Level Rise
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Early schemes to model the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and their impact on sea levels failed to accurately account for changes caused by snowfall and snow melt. These changes depend on ice sheet elevation and region. Researchers developed a new method that includes the effects of elevation and region.

Released: 15-Apr-2015 8:05 AM EDT
Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Limits Soil Storage
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Soil carbon may not be as stable as previously thought. Also, soil microbes exert more direct control on carbon buildup than global climate models represent.

Released: 17-Apr-2015 8:05 AM EDT
Comparing Climate Models to Real World Shows Differences in Precipitation Intensity
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Precipitation is difficult to represent in global climate models. Although most single-column models can reproduce the observed average precipitation reasonably well, there are significant differences in their details. Scientists evaluated several single-column models, providing insights on how to improve models’ representation of convection, which is integral to storm cloud formation.

Released: 17-Apr-2015 9:05 AM EDT
Examining How Radiative Fluxes Are Affected by Cloud and Particle Characteristics
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Climate models calculate a changing mix of clouds and emissions that interact with solar energy. To narrow the broad range of possible answers from a climate model, researchers analyzed the effect of several proven numerical stand-ins for atmospheric processes on the energy flux at the top of the atmosphere. They found that the flux is the main driver of surface temperature change.

Released: 14-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
STAR Heavy Flavor Tracker Detects Signs of Charm at RHIC
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Thousands of times a second the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory re-creates the hot quark soup that existed at the dawn of the universe. Particles composed of heavy quarks can help reveal details about the quark-gluon plasma, and by extension, the early universe and the origins of matter.

Released: 20-Apr-2015 9:05 AM EDT
New Path to Loss-Free Electricity
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Electric current flows without any resistance in a superconducting state thanks to a surprising redistribution of bonding electrons and the associated electronic and atomic behavior after substitution of some cobalt atoms for iron in barium iron arsenide.

Released: 21-Apr-2015 10:05 AM EDT
Connecting Three Atomic Layers Puts Semiconducting Science on Its Edge
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A new semiconducting material that is only three atomic layers thick exhibits electronic properties beyond traditional semiconductors. Two nano-engineered configurations of the material have shown an enhanced response to light, possibly leading to new modes of solar energy conversion and associated devices.

Released: 24-Apr-2015 1:05 PM EDT
Direct Visualization of Magnetoelectric Domains
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Using a novel microscopy technique, scientists revealed a major enhancement of coupling between electric and magnetic dipoles. The discovery could lead to devices for use in computer memory or magnetic sensors.

Released: 24-Apr-2015 2:05 PM EDT
Intertwining of Superconductivity and Magnetism
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Experiments on a copper-oxide superconductor reveal nearly static, spatially modulated magnetism. Because static magnetism and superconductivity do not like to coexist in the same material, the superconducting wave function is also likely modulated in space and phase-shifted to minimize overlap, consistent with recent theory. This insight will aid in writing a predictive theory for high-temperature superconductivity.

Released: 23-Apr-2015 1:00 PM EDT
Highly Conductive Germanium Nanowires Made by a Simple, One-Step Process
Department of Energy, Office of Science

For the first time, germanium nanowires have been deposited on indium tin oxide substrate by a simple, one-step process called electrodeposition. The nanowires produced by this method have outstanding electronic properties and can be used as high-capacity anode material for lithium-ion batteries; however, the nanowires were previously too expensive and difficult to produce. This process may resolve the cost issue.

Released: 22-Apr-2015 2:05 PM EDT
Metamaterials Shine Bright as New Terahertz Source
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Metamaterials allow design and use of light-matter interactions at a fundamental level. An efficient terahertz emission from two-dimensional arrays of gold split-ring resonator metamaterials was discovered as a result of excitation by a near-infrared pulsed laser.

Released: 10-Apr-2015 2:05 PM EDT
Deciphering Distinct Atomic Motions in Proteins with Dynamic Neutron Scattering
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Whether inside algae turning biomass to fuels or human cells reacting to radiation exposure, proteins change their shape via atomic motions to perform a specific task. Scientists determined three classes of atomic motion, helping enable discoveries related to biobased or bio-inspired materials for energy production and use.

Released: 21-Apr-2015 1:05 PM EDT
Electrons Move Like Light in Three-Dimensional Solid
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A stable bulk material shows the same physics found in graphene, which illuminated the interactions of electron’s orbital motion and its intrinsic magnetic orientation. The new material will be a test ground for theories on how electron interactions in solids shape exotic electron behavior.

Released: 20-Apr-2015 11:05 AM EDT
Giant Magnetic Effects Induced in Hybrid Materials
Department of Energy, Office of Science

For a magnetic thin film deposited onto a transition metal oxide film, the magnetic properties change dramatically as the oxide undergoes a structural phase transition. The hybrid between a simple magnetic material and a transition-metal oxide provides a “window” to understand the metal-to-insulator transition and offers dramatic tunability of magnetic properties. Potential applications are envisioned in the fields of information storage and power transmission.

Released: 27-Apr-2015 9:05 AM EDT
Artificial Spin Ice: A New Playground to Better Understand Magnetism
Department of Energy, Office of Science

For the first time, nanomagnet islands or arrays were arranged into an exotic structure (called “shakti”) that does not directly relate to any known natural material. The “shakti” artificial spin ice configuration was fabricated and reproduced experimentally. The arrays are theoretical predictions of multiple ground states that are characteristic of frustrated magnetic materials. The results open the door to experiments on other artificial spin-ice lattices, predicted to host interesting phenomena.

Released: 27-Apr-2015 8:05 AM EDT
New Magnetic Phase Confirms Theoretical Predictions Related to Unconventional Superconductivity
Department of Energy, Office of Science

The emergence of a new magnetic phase with a square lattice before the onset of superconductivity is revealed in some iron arsenide compounds, confirming theoretical predictions of the effects of doping on magnetic interactions between the iron atoms and their relationship to high temperature superconductivity. Understanding the origin of thermodynamic phases is vital in developing a unified theory for the elusive microscopic mechanism underlying high-temperature superconductivity.

Released: 17-Apr-2015 2:05 PM EDT
SD Mines to Host International 'Conference on Science at the Sanford Underground Research Facility'
Department of Energy, Office of Science

The conference will address scientific research related to the laboratory in nearby Lead, S.D.

Released: 7-May-2015 12:05 PM EDT
The US and CERN Upgrade Their Relationship
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A new agreement paves the way for joint projects between the United States and CERN.

Released: 7-May-2015 1:05 PM EDT
U.S.-CERN Agreement Paves Way for New Era of Scientific Discovery
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Department of Energy and National Science Foundation sign agreement for U.S. participation in particle physics research.

Released: 13-May-2015 7:05 AM EDT
Deciphering Distinct Atomic Motions in Proteins with Dynamic Neutron Scattering
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Inside algae that turn biomass to fuels, proteins change their shape to perform a specific job. These shape-changing processes are difficult to measure, but scientists have determined three classes of atomic motion.

Released: 14-May-2015 7:05 AM EDT
Predicting Magnetic Behavior in Copper Oxide Superconductors
Department of Energy, Office of Science

Enabled by high-performance computing, the magnetic couplings in model systems for copper-containing cuprate superconductors were accurately calculated for the first time.

Released: 15-May-2015 7:05 AM EDT
Towards a Tunable Graphene-like Two-Dimensional Material
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A new porous material exhibits high electrical conductivity as a bulk material that is potentially tunable and has unusual temperature dependence, suggesting new fundamental physics.

Released: 18-May-2015 7:05 AM EDT
Bringing Order to Defects: Making Way for Oxygen to Move
Department of Energy, Office of Science

A new metal oxide was discovered whose atomic structure includes highly ordered arrays of missing oxygen atoms. This structure allows oxygen ions to move through the material quickly and easily at low temperatures.


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