2018 | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

The Career Pivot: It's Not Just for People

Originally known solely for its work in high energy physics, SLAC pivoted its accelerator in 2009 to the LCLS, which looks at everything from living cells to chemical reactions. This December, the laser will go dark for two years to make way for its daunting successor—LCLS-II, which will be 10,000 times brighter.

UH Engineer Part of $800K DOE Study Targeting Safer Storage for Nuclear Waste

Dr. Jeffrey Rimer, with the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering, is studying the corrosion behavior of glass containers often used to store nuclear waste. Its goal is to find solutions to reduce or avoid the degeneration of the containers.

Paris Perdikaris Predicts Complex Outcomes of Physical Systems

An assistant professor in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Perdikaris is taking a new approach to modeling complex and unpredictable physical systems, research that is being funded by an Early Career Award from the Department of Energy (DOE).

Scientists Take Important Step Toward Understanding Higgs Boson Decay

The Large Hadron Collider collaborations ATLAS and CMS jointly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson transforming into bottom quarks as it decays. This is predicted to be the most common way for Higgs bosons to decay, yet was a difficult signal to isolate because background processes closely mimic the subtle signal.

Catalyst Advance Could Lead to Economical Fuel Cells

Researchers at Washington State University have developed a new way to make low-cost, single-atom catalysts for fuel cells — an advance that could make important clean energy technology more economically viable.

Researchers Discover How Caged Molecules 'Rattle and Sing'

A team of energy researchers from the University of Minnesota and University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered that molecular motion can be predicted with high accuracy when confining molecules in small nanocages.

Project to Elucidate the Structure of Atomic Nuclei at the Femtoscale

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility, has selected 10 data science and machine learning projects for its Aurora Early Science Program (ESP).

Omer San Selected to Receive Early Career Research Funding

The Department of Energy (DOE) has selected Omer San, Oklahoma State University mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor as one of 84 scientists from across the nation to receive significant funding for research as part of the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program.

BNL-Stony Brook Joint Outreach Exposes Young Women to Nanoscience

Opportunities to experience what scientists do were few and far between for Shruti Sharma while growing up in India. This lack of early exposure to hands-on science activities contributed to Sharma—now a fifth-year PhD candidate graduating this summer from the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—becoming involved in educational outreach.

Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford Physicist Burton Richter Dies at 87

Burton Richter, the Paul Pigott Professor in the Physical Sciences, Emeritus, former director of the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics, died July 18 in Palo Alto. He was 87.

Study Finds Climate Determines Shapes of River Basins

MIT scientists have discovered that a river basins shape is heavily influenced by the climate in which they form. The team found that in dry regions of the country, river basins take on a long and thin contour, regardless of their size. In more humid environments, river basins vary: Larger basins, on the scale of hundreds of kilometers, are long and thin, while smaller basins, spanning a few kilometers, are noticeably short and squat.

Getting to Know the Microbes that Drive Climate Change

A new understanding of the microbes and viruses in the thawing permafrost in Sweden may help scientists better predict the pace of climate change. Microbes have significant influence over global warming, primarily through the production of – or consumption of – methane, and new details about these microscopic beings’ genetics is now available, thanks to a trio of studies from a project co-led by researchers at The Ohio State University.