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

New Form of Carbon that's Hard as a Rock, Yet Elastic, Like Rubber

A team including several Carnegie scientists has developed a form of ultrastrong, lightweight carbon that is also elastic and electrically conductive. A material with such a unique combination of properties could serve a wide variety of applications from aerospace engineering to military armor.

ASU-led Scientists Discover Why Rocks Flow Slowly in Earth's Middle Mantle

A recent study, led by Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration Associate Professor Dan Shim, has re-created in the laboratory the conditions found deep in the earth, and used this to discover an important property of the dominant mineral in Earth's mantle, a region lying far below our feet.

Triple Play Boosting Value of Renewable Fuel Could Tip Market in Favor of Biomass

UW–Madison researchers and collaborators have developed a new “green” technology for converting non-edible biomass into three high-value chemicals that are the basis for products traditionally made from petroleum.

Discovery of an Alga’s ‘Dictionary of Genes’ Could Lead to Advances in Biofuels and Medicine

Plant biologists and biochemists from UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco have produced a gold mine of data by sequencing the genome of a green alga called Chromochloris zofingiensis.

Ames Laboratory Celebrates 70 Years of Science and Discovery on Iowa State’s Campus

The U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory is celebrating 70 years on the Iowa State University campus. The close university-laboratory ties have helped recruit researchers, educate students, build research teams and make scientific discoveries possible.

Electroplating Delivers High-Energy, High-Power Batteries

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Xerion Advanced Battery Corporation and Nanjing University in China developed a method for electroplating lithium-ion battery cathodes, yielding high-quality, high-performance battery materials that could also open the door to flexible and solid-state batteries.

Physics Graduate Student Wins National Award, Fellowship

Bethany Matthews, an Oregon State University graduate student studying physics, has recently won a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Award. This prestigious award will see her continue her work on the physics of materials at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, this summer and into the fall.

Self-Healing Tech Charges Up Performance for Silicon-Containing Battery Anodes

Illinois professors Nancy Sottos and Scott White led a team that developed a silicon nanoparticle composite material for battery anodes that could lead to more reliable and longer-lasting batteries.

Hafnia Dons a New Face

A collaborative University of Kentucky-Texas A&M University team has observed in real-time the transformation of a hafnia nanorod from its room temperature to tetragonal phase at 1000 degrees less than its bulk temperature.

Liquid-Crystal and Bacterial Living Materials Organize and Move in their Own Way

Smart glass, transitional lenses and mood rings are not the only things made of liquid crystals; mucus, slug slime and cell membranes also contain them. Now, a team of researchers is trying to better understand how liquid crystals, combined with bacteria, form living materials and how the two interact to organize and move.

High-Temperature Devices Made from Films that Bend as they “Breathe”

Carrying out maintenance tasks inside a nuclear plant puts severe strains on equipment, due to extreme temperatures that are hard for components to endure without degrading. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a radically new way to make actuators that could be used in such extremely hot environments.

Study Shows Proteins May Prevent Dysfunction and Disease by Relaxing

A new study by a team of University of Chicago and Notre Dame researchers suggests many proteins remain expanded in the cell, rather than contracting into tight folded shapes.