University Research | U.S. DOE Office of Science (SC)

Research Collaboration Brings New Concepts for Potassium-Ion Batteries

Researchers at Purdue University are making progress in developing rechargeable batteries based on potassium, a potential alternative to lithium that’s less expensive and far more plentiful, and also have shown how to derive carbon for battery electrodes from old tires.

How to Build Artificial Nanofactories to Power Our Futures: Logistics

Scientists at the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory are trying to build artificial nanofactories to sustainably produce industrial materials or medical tools.

Deer Prefer Native Plants Leaving Lasting Damage on Forests

When rampant white-tailed deer graze in forests, they prefer to eat native plants over certain unpalatable invasive plants, such as garlic mustard and Japanese stiltgrass. These eating habits lower native plant diversity and abundance, while increasing the proportion of plant communities made up of non-native species, according to a new study.

Pop Lends Expertise to International Competition for Metagenomics Software

Mihai Pop, a professor of computer science with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, recently helped judge an international challenge called the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI), which benchmarked metagenomics software.

UW Awarded $12.5 Million to Study Astrophysical Plasma Here on Earth

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $12.5 million to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to develop an integrated facility that will expand the frontier of astrophysical plasma research.

Fast-Moving Magnetic Particles Could Enable New Form of Data Storage

New research has shown that an exotic kind of magnetic behavior discovered just a few years ago holds great promise as a way of storing data — one that could overcome fundamental limits that might otherwise be signaling the end of “Moore’s Law,” which describes the ongoing improvements in computation and data storage over recent decades.

Breaking the Rules: Heavy Chemical Elements Alter Theory of Quantum Mechanics

Florida State University researchers found that the theory of quantum mechanics does not adequately explain how the heaviest and rarest elements found at the end of the table function. Instead, another well-known scientific theory — Albert Einstein’s famous Theory of Relativity — helps govern the behavior of the last 21 elements of the Periodic Table.

Melting Solid Below the Freezing Point

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Argonne National Laboratory have discovered a new phenomenon of so-called metastability in a liquid phase by melting a high-pressure solid crystal of the metal bismuth via a decompression process below its melting point.

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.