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

Unlocking the Biofuel Energy Stored in Plant Cell Walls

Penn State scientists are studying how the cell walls are made, information that could lead to better ways of harvesting the energy stored in their chemical bonds.

Gamma Rays From Distant Galaxy Tell Story of an Escape

New observations from VERITAS and other telescopes advance understanding of blazars as cosmic accelerators and as beacons for gamma-ray cosmology.

Scientists Create Atomically Thin Metallic Boron

A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University and Stony Brook University has, for the first time, created a two-dimensional sheet of boron -- a material known as borophene.

A New Fusion Collaboration for MIT

Members of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) community are cheering the start of a long-anticipated physics experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, Germany.

Three Princeton Teams Receive INCITE Supercomputing Grants

Three projects based at Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have received a total of 162 million processor hours on the two most powerful computers in the nation dedicated to open science thanks to Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.

IU Biologists Partner Bacterium with Nitrogen Gas to Produce More, Cleaner Bioethanol

Indiana University biologists believe they have found a faster, cheaper and cleaner way to increase bioethanol production by using nitrogen gas, the most abundant gas in Earth’s atmosphere, in place of more costly industrial fertilizers.

UT Arlington Awarded Department of Energy Grant to Develop Sensor System for Real-Time Evaluation of Boilers

A University of Texas at Arlington engineering professor is developing a distributed wireless antenna sensor system to monitor conditions of coal-fired boilers that will lead to making the units safer, more efficient and eventually producing better designed units.

Team Led by UCLA and Columbia Engineers Uses Disorder to Control Light on a Nanoscale

Findings could lead to more precise information transfer in computer chips and other applications.

New Tabletop Detector “Sees” Single Electrons

MIT physicists have developed a new tabletop particle detector that is able to identify single electrons in a radioactive gas.

Physics of Heavy Ion Induced Damage in Nanotwinned Metals Revealed by Researchers at Texas A&M University

A group of researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University led by Dr. Xinghang Zhang has investigated defect dynamics in heavy ion (Krypton) irradiated nanotwinned Ag and revealed twin boundary-defect clusters interactions via in situ radiation.

CT Scan of Earth Links Deep Mantle Plumes with Volcanic Hotspots

University of California, Berkeley, seismologists have produced for the first time a sharp, three-dimensional scan of Earth’s interior that conclusively connects plumes of hot rock rising through the mantle with surface hotspots that generate volcanic island chains like Hawaii, Samoa and Iceland.

Faculty and Students Work on “Ghost Particle” Experiment

William and Mary researchers are studying the mysteries of ghost particles known as neutrinos through the NOvA experiment, which is managed by DOE’s Fermilab.