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

University of Minnesota Receives Major U.S. Department of Energy Grant to Study Next Generation of Materials

The grant will be used to study materials at the most fundamental level that could improve important technologies including data storage, superconductors, fuel cells, and electrical power plants.

A Window Into Battery Life for Next-Gen Lithium Cells

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan are studing dendrites, whiskers of lithium that grow inside batteries and can cause fires like those in the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 that are the bane of next-generation lithium batteries.

Five Scientists Selected as FRIB Fellows

Five scientists have been selected as the first Facility for Rare Isotope Beams-Chinese Scholarship Council research fellows. The fellowship program is part of a memorandum of understanding agreed to between Michigan State University and China’s Peking University.

Stanford Researchers Help to Explain How Stars are Born and Cosmic Structures Evolve

Working with information sent from the Japanese Hitomi satellite, an international team of researchers that include Stanford scientists has obtained the first views of a supermassive black hole stirring hot gas at the heart of a galaxy cluster, like a spoon stirring cream into coffee.

Crop Roots Enact Austerity Measures During Drought to Bank Water

New work from a team led by Carnegie’s José Dinneny discovers a strategy employed by grasses in drought conditions that could potentially be harnessed to improve crop productivity.

Clouds Are Moving Higher, Subtropical Dry Zones Expanding, According to Satellite Analysis

A Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego-led research team analyzing satellite cloud records has found that the cloudy storm tracks on Earth are moving toward the poles and subtropical dry zones are expanding.

New Clues Could Help Scientists Harness the Power of Photosynthesis

Discovery by researchers at Penn State University could enable scientists to engineer crop plants that more efficiently harness the energy of the Sun.

Researchers Improve Performance of Cathode Material by Controlling Oxygen Activity

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to increase the robustness and energy storage capability of a particular class of “lithium-rich” cathode materials—by using a carbon dioxide-based gas mixture to create oxygen vacancies at the material’s surface.

Indiana University Physicists Playing Key Roles in Quest for New Particles

Physicists from Indiana University and Old Dominion University have released a review paper that explores the current state of knowledge on the subatomic particles, quarks and neutrinos, from experiment sites ranging from the Large Hadron Collider to Fermilab and Jefferson Lab.

Study Finds That Plant Growth Responses to High Carbon Dioxide Depend on Symbiotic Fungi

Research by an international team of environmental scientists from the United Kingdom, Belgium and United States, including Indiana University, has found that plants that associate with one type of symbiotic fungi grow bigger in response to high levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the atmosphere, but plants that associate with the other major type of symbiotic fungi do not.

Injectable Biomaterial Could be Used to Manipulate Organ Behavior

Scientists from two UChicago labs came up with a new material composed of nanoparticles that forms the basis of an ingenious light-activated injectable device that could eventually be used to stimulate nerve cells and manipulate the behavior of muscles and organs.

World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector Completes Search

At a conference in the United Kingdom, scientists with the LUX dark matter experiment present results from the detector’s final 20-month run.