2017 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Examining Exploding Stars Through the Atomic Nucleus

Michigan State University researchers investigated stellar production of the radioactive isotope aluminum-26 present in the Milky Way and concluded that up to 30 percent could be produced in novae; the rest must be produced in other sources like supernovae.

Rice University Takes Deeper Look at Unconventional Oil and Gas

Rice engineers George Hirasaki and Walter Chapman are leading an effort to better characterize the contents of organic shale by combining standard nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) – the same technology used by hospitals to see inside human bodies – with molecular dynamics simulations.

Penn Researchers Are Among the First to Grow a Versatile Two-dimensional Material

University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.

Bright Lights, Big Science: Joel Williams Helping Unleash Some of the World’s Brightest X-rays

Thanks to a DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research award, Joel Williams, a Colorado State University electrical engineering graduate student, is spending the next few months at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on the design of an X-ray free-electron laser.

Scientists Discover New Helium Chemistry

An international team of researchers led by Skoltech’s Artem R. Oganov (also a professor at Stony Brook University and head of Computational Materials Discovery laboratory at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) has predicted two stable helium compounds—Na₂He and Na₂He O.

Husker Scientists Boost Performance of Emerging Nanomaterial

Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Drexel University demonstrated that modifying the traditional method of synthesizing MXene sheets created defect-free flakes that were about 25 times larger, significantly more conductive, and far less susceptible to degradation.

Catalyzing Discovery

Researchers at the Energy Frontier Research Center’s (EFRC) Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis (IMASC) at Harvard have shown that the process of catalysis is more dynamic than previously imagined, and that molecular forces can vastly influence the process.

Paper Spotlights Key Flaw in Widely Used Radioisotope Dating Technique

An oversight in a radioisotope dating technique used to date everything from meteorites to geologic samples means that scientists have likely overestimated the age of many samples, according to new research from North Carolina State University.

Plant Regulatory Proteins “Tagged” with Sugar

New work from Carnegie’s Shouling Xu and Zhiyong Wang reveals that the process of synthesizing many important master proteins in plants involves extensive modification, or “tagging” by sugars after the protein is assembled.

Researchers Investigate Mechanics of Lithium Sulfides

For the first time, a team at MIT has probed the mechanical properties of a sulfide-based solid electrolyte material, to determine its mechanical performance when incorporated into batteries.

Pattern Discovery over Pattern Recognition: A New Way for Computers to See

Jim Crutchfield, who leads the UC Davis Complexity Sciences Center, along with physics graduate student Adam Rupe and postdoc Ryan James, is designing new machine learning systems to allow supercomputers to spot large-scale atmospheric structures, such as hurricanes and atmospheric rivers, in climate data.

New Technique Could Lead to Safer, More Efficient Uranium Extraction, Aid Environmental Cleanup

The separation of uranium, a key part of the nuclear fuel cycle, could potentially be done more safely and efficiently through a new technique developed by chemistry researchers at Oregon State University.