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

Into the Wild: Exploring Yeast Biodiversity for Better Biofuel

Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center postdoctoral researcher David Peris is harnessing the power of yeast biodiversity in order to develop yeast strains that can address the challenges of the cellulosic biofuel industry.

Hydrology Graduate Student Wins DOE Research Award

Lauren Foster, a PhD student in the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program at Colorado School of Mines, will spend next year researching the effects of climate change in complex terrain at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program.

High Temperature Step-by-Step Process Makes Graphene from Ethene

An international team of scientists has developed a new way to produce single-layer graphene from a simple precursor: ethene – also known as ethylene – the smallest alkene molecule, which contains just two atoms of carbon.

Shunned by Microbes, Organic Carbon Can Resist Breakdown in Underground Environments

A new study conducted by scientists at Stanford University reveals that organic matter whose breakdown would yield only minimal energy for hungry microorganisms preferentially builds up in floodplains, illuminating a new mechanism of carbon sequestration.

Board Approves Planning $35M for FRIB Construction Projects

The Michigan State University Board of Trustees approved the university to begin planning for new construction adding to the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB.

Two Holograms in One Surface

A team at Caltech has figured out a way to encode more than one holographic image in a single surface without any loss of resolution.

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Columbia Engineers Create Artificial Graphene in a Nanofabricated Semiconductor Structure

Researchers at Columbia Engineering are the first to observe the electronic structure of graphene in an engineered semiconductor; finding could lead to progress in advanced optoelectronics and data processing.

Rules for Superconductivity Mirrored in 'Excitonic Insulator'

Rice University physicists dedicated to creating the working components of a fault-tolerant quantum computer have succeeded in creating a previously unseen state of matter.

Physicists Excited by Discovery of New Form of Matter, Excitonium

By developing a novel technique, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Illinois; University of California, Berkeley; and University of Amsterdam have measured for the first time the collective excitations of the low-energy bosonic particles and observed the precursor to exciton condensation, a soft plasmon phase.

Hyperlens Crystal Capable of Viewing Living Cells in Unprecedented Detail

Construction of instruments with an optical lens so powerful that it lets you view features the size of a small virus on the surface of a living cell in its natural environment is now possible because of a fundamental advance in the quality of an optical material used in hyperlensing, a method of creating lenses that can resolve objects much smaller than the wavelength of light.

Researchers Model Optimal Amount of Rainfall for Plants

A team of researchers, led by Stephen Good, a hydrologist at Oregon State University, have determined what could be considered a “Goldilocks” climate for rainfall use by plants: not too wet and not too dry.

MACHOs are Dead. WIMPs are a No-show. Say Hello to SIMPs.

The intensive, worldwide search for dark matter, the missing mass in the universe, has so far failed to find an abundance of dark, massive stars or scads of strange new weakly interacting particles, but a new candidate is slowly gaining followers and observational support.