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

Taking the Brakes Off Plant Production: Not So Good After All

When engineers want to speed up a system, they look for the slowest steps and make them faster. In plants, this approach potentially does more harm than good, says the Kramer lab.

Doctoral, Graduate Student Earns Award from Department of Energy

Amin Nikakhtar, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing & Systems Engineering in the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering and a master’s student in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Arts & Sciences, is seeking a fast and efficient mathematical solution to optimize and improve the performance of a certain process given the process constraints.

Resistive Memory Components the Computer Industry Can’t Resist

Scientists at Yale, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) have produced new “memsistor” devices that last for 1 trillion cycles — far outstripping the endurance of commercial flash memories for computing.

Astronomers Strike Cosmic Gold

Based on the brightness and color of the light emitted following the merger, which closely match theoretical predictions by University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists, astronomers can now say that the gold or platinum in your wedding ring was in all likelihood forged during the brief but violent merger of two orbiting neutron stars somewhere in the universe.

Material Could Bring Optical Communication Onto Silicon Chips

Researchers at MIT have designed a light-emitter and detector that can be integrated into silicon CMOS chips.

Physics Boosts Artificial Intelligence Methods

Researchers from Caltech and the University of Southern California (USC) report the first application of quantum computing to a physics problem. By employing quantum-compatible machine learning techniques, they developed a method of extracting a rare Higgs boson signal from copious noise data.

Assessment Shows Metagenomics Software Has Much Room for Improvement

A recent critical assessment of software tools represents a key step toward taming the “Wild West” nature of the burgeoning field of metagenomics, said an Oregon State University mathematical biologist who took part in the research.

Printed Meds Could Reinvent Phamracies adn Drug Research

A technology developed at the University Michigan, can print pure, ultra-precise doses of drugs onto a wide variety of surfaces could one day enable on-site printing of custom-dosed medications at pharmacies, hospitals and other locations. Researchers say it could make life easier for patients who must now take multiple medications every day.

Forget Sponges: The Earliest Animals Were Marine Jellies

A team of evolutionary biologists from Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have devised a new approach designed specifically to settle contentious phylogenetic tree-of-life issues.

Argon is not the “Dope” for Metallic Hydrogen

Researchers from the Carnegie Institute of Science, Uppsala University and the University of Chicago found that argon-doped hydrogen stayed in its molecular form even up to the highest pressures, unable to force hydrogen into a superconductive, metallic state.

GLBRC Scientists Win DOE funding to Create High-Value Chemicals from Woody Biomass

With up to $1.8 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), scientists affiliated with the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) will conduct research with the potential to turn woody biomass into an economical source of renewable chemicals.

Research Center Established to Explore the Least Understood and Strongest Force Behind Visible Matter

Stony Brook University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) have established the Center for Frontiers of Nuclear Science to help scientists better understand the building blocks of visible matter.