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

Cyborg Bacteria Turn Into Tiny, Zero-Waste Solar Panels

To help humans capture more of the sun’s energy than natural photosynthesis can, UC Berkeley scientists have taught bacteria to cover themselves in tiny, highly efficient solar panels to produce useful chemical compounds.

Researchers Report Breakthrough in Magnesium Batteries

Researchers at the University of Houston report the discovery of a new design for the battery cathode, drastically increasing the storage capacity and upending conventional wisdom that the magnesium-chloride bond must be broken before inserting magnesium into the host.

Texas A&M Physicist Rupak Mahapatra Earns DOE Grant for Detector Research

Mahapatra, a 2010 DOE Early Career Research Award recipient and a principal investigator since 2003 with SuperCDMS and the affiliated SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, will receive $460,000 through the Office of High Energy Physics in support of his proposal, Ultra-low Threshold Cryogenic High Voltage Detectors for WIMP Search and Coherent Neutrino Scattering Experiments.

New Study Shows FRIB Significantly Impacts Michigan’s Economy

A new economic impact study shows the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University is expected to have a significant impact on Michigan’s economy and job creation.

Best of Both Worlds

Metallic glass – with the best properties of glass and metal – offers advantages that will define the future as silicon has defined the information age, according to Takeshi Egami, UT-ORNL Distinguished Scientist and professor of materials science and engineering.

OSU Scientist Leads Massive Drought Research Project

A new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution brought together 62 scientists, led by Henry Adams at Oklahoma State University, from across the globe to synthesize all known research from drought manipulation studies that killed trees to develop a more accurate land-surface prediction model.

Dark Energy Survey Offers New View of Dark Matter Halos

Using data from the first year of the Dark Energy Survey, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago provide evidence that dark matter halos around galaxy clusters have an edge due to the “splashback effect.”

GLBRC Celebrates 1,000th Publication

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), one of three bioenergy research centers established in 2007 by the Biological and Environmental Research program in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, recently published its 1,000th scientific paper.

Rutgers Physics Student Wins Three National Graduate Fellowships

Jennifer Coulter, a senior honored with a prestigious Goldwater scholarship last year, chose the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. She will begin her studies in the applied physics program at Harvard University this fall and pursue a doctorate in physics.

Researchers Describe Cell Structures, Mechanisms that Enable Bacteria to Resist Antibiotics

Iowa State University's Edward Yu and his research group recently published two papers describing the efflux pumps and transporters that certain disease-causing bacteria use to keep antibiotics away.

Soil Researchers Quantify an Important, Underappreciated Factor in Carbon Release to the Atmosphere

Biogeochemist Marco Keiluweit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere for the first time provide evidence that anaerobic microsites play a much larger role in stabilizing carbon in soils than previously thought.

Reaching for Neutron Stars

For more than a decade, a cross-disciplinary team of chemists and physicists in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis has been chasing the atomic nucleus. With progressive studies, they moved up the element chain to Calcium-48, an extremely rare solid commodity that has more neutrons than protons and, as such, carries a hefty price tag of $100,000 per gram.

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