2015 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

INCITE Grants Awarded to 56 Computational Research Projects

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced 56 projects aimed at accelerating discovery and innovation to address some of the world’s most challenging scientific questions.

On the Way to Multiband Solar Cells

Researchers at Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division are working to understand and develop a modified solar cell structure that would capture a wider range of available energies across the solar spectrum.

Atoms to Engines

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, FCA US LLC, and the foundry giant, Nemak of Mexico, are combining their strengths to create lightweight powertrain materials that will help the auto industry speed past the technological roadblocks to its target of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

Microbes Map Path Toward Renewable Energy Future

In the quest for renewable fuels, scientists are taking lessons from a humble bacterium that fills our oceans and covers moist surfaces the world over. When blue-green algae captures light to make food using photosynthesis, scientists have found that it simultaneously uses the energy from that captured light to produce hydrogen.

CinderBio Harnesses Extreme Microbes for Greener Industry

Basic biology research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has led to the formation of Cinder Biological, or CinderBio, a startup company producing a new class of enzymes made from microbes that thrive in hot volcanic waters.

Titan Takes on Earthquakes

A team led by Thomas Jordan of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), headquartered at the University of Southern California (USC), is using the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop physics-based earthquake simulations to better understand earthquake systems, including the potential seismic hazards from known faults and the impact of strong ground motions on urban areas.

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PPPL Physicists Find Clue to Formation of Magnetic Fields Around Stars and Galaxies

Physicists Jonathan Squire and Amitava Bhattacharjee at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found a clue to the answer in the collective behavior of small magnetic disturbances.

Visualizing Single Cell Growth Dynamics

As part of the Mesoscale to Molecules In-situ Bioimaging project at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), which is sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research, researchers from PNNL and EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, constructed a microfluidic device consisting of separate channels for growing individual hyphae—the long, branching, filamentous units making up fungi.

New Electron Microscopy Method Sculpts 3-D Structures at Atomic Level

Electron microscopy researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a unique way to build 3-D structures with finely controlled shapes as small as one to two billionths of a meter.

ESnet and NERSC Blaze 400G Production Network Path

The Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have built a 400 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) super-channel, the first-ever 400G production link to be deployed by a national research and education network.

New ORNL Device Combines Power of Mass Spectrometry, Microscopy

A tool that provides world-class microscopy and spatially resolved chemical analysis shows considerable promise for advancing a number of areas of study, including chemical science, pharmaceutical development and disease progression.

Pumping Water for Irrigation Likely to Increase Drought Vulnerability in Certain Regions, PNNL Shows Via Modeling Expertise

Regions that depend primarily on irrigation from surface water will be more vulnerable to drought as the impacts of irrigation on water supply are most significant during times with low water flow, according to climate modeling research from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.