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

Law of Soot Light Absorption: Current Climate Models Underestimate Warming by Black Carbon Aerosol

Rajan Chakrabarty, assistant professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, and William R. Heinson, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in Chakrabarty’s lab, have discovered something new about soot, or rather, a new law that describes its ability to absorb light: the law of light absorption.

Manganese May Finally Solve Hydrogen Fuel Cells' Catalyst Problem

Manganese is known for making stainless steel and aluminum soda cans. Now, researchers say the metal could advance one of the most promising sources of renewable energy: hydrogen fuel cells.

Research Offers Hope for Simpler Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment

Monitoring cancer can often be an intrusive and exhausting process for patients. But with BYU chemistry professor Ryan Kelly’s new research, there is hope for a simpler way: No more biopsies. No more spinal taps. Instead, patients may be able to take a simple blood test to diagnose, monitor and tailor appropriate therapies for various cancers.

UCI Scientists Discover Technique for Manipulating Magnets at Nanoscale

Physicists from the University of California, Irvine have discovered a new way to control magnets at the nanometer scale by electric current.

Smallest Life Forms Have Smallest Working CRISPR System

The smallest known CRISPR gene-editing system—the Cas14 protein—was found by University of California, Berkeley researchers in a database of microbial genomes and metagenomes assembled over the past 15 years at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute and has potential as a biotech tool to edit genes, improving rapid CRISPR diagnostic systems now under development for infectious diseases, genetic mutations and cancer.

New Algorithm Can More Quickly Predict LED Materials

Researchers from the University of Houston have devised a new machine learning algorithm that is efficient enough to run on a personal computer and predict the properties of more than 100,000 compounds in search of those most likely to be efficient phosphors for LED lighting.

Tethered Antibodies Present a Potential New Approach to Prevent Influenza Virus Infections All Season Long

As co-leaders of an international collaboration, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered that tethering four antibodies together may be an effective strategy for neutralizing all types of influenza virus known to infect humans.

Yale Receives $3.6 Million to Build Quantum Computer Memory

Earlier this month, a group of Yale researchers received a $3.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the memory components of quantum computers. The research team, led by professor of electrical engineering Hong Tang, works out of Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Yale Quantum Institute.

Next-gen Camera for South Pole Telescope Takes Data on Early Universe

The University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—have worked together to build a new, ultra-sensitive camera for the South Pole telescope, containing 16,000 specially manufactured detectors.

Georgetown Professor Awarded Two Department of Energy Grants

Professor James Freericks of the Department of Physics has received two grants totaling $1.75 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. The grants are both part of the Department of Energy’s recent $218 million initiative to promote quantum information science.

Genetic Behavior Reveals Cause of Death in Poplars Essential to Ecosystems

Scientists studying the valuable, but vulnerable, black cottonwood poplar have identified the genetic mechanism responsible for the species’ inability to resist a pervasive and deadly disease.

Rice U. Scientists Form Flat Tellurium

Amey Apte and his colleagues at Rice University made tellurium, a rare metal, into a film less than a nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) thick by melting a powder of the element at high temperature and blowing the atoms onto a surface.