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

A Step Toward Renewable Diesel

MIT engineers have genetically reprogrammed a strain of yeast so that it converts sugars to fats much more efficiently, an advance that could make possible the renewable production of high-energy fuels such as diesel.

Manganese Oxides in Treatment System Could Be Mixed Blessing

Researchers at North Carolina State University found that a fungal catalyst can oxidize manganese, creating oxides which have a large affinity for metals thus creating a passive treatment to remove micro-pollutants out of water.

New Design Strategy for Longer Lasting Batteries

Christopher Wolverton, professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, has developed a new computational design strategy that can pinpoint optimal materials with which to coat the cathode in lithium-ion batteries, protecting it from degradation and ultimately extending the battery’s — and device’s — life.

Scientists Enlist Supercomputers and Machine Learning to Automatically Identify Brain Tumors

A team led by University of Texas at Austin researchers shines in the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge.

MSU Scientist Wins $1.2 Million Federal Grant to Improve Camelina Seed Qualities

A Montana State University scientist has received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to research ways to improve the usefulness of camelina, an ancient crop that the modern world has come to value as a potential source of alternative fuel.

New Research on Shallow Warm Clouds will Advance Climate Models and Weather Forecasts

David Mechem, an associate professor in the Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas, is leading a new $525,000, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to better understand the fundamental processes governing the behavior of shallow clouds, the low-hanging cottony clouds often seen on a summer day or over ocean waters.

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.

‘Y’ a Protein Unicorn Might Matter in Glaucoma

Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered a Y-shaped part found in the middle of a mysterious protein studied in glaucoma.

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.

Stony Brook Scientists Solve Fundamental Puzzle in Medical Imaging

Scientists from Stony Brook University have used a novel technique at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at Brookhaven National Laboratory, to answer longstanding questions in medical imaging.

MIT Students Fortify Concrete by Adding Recycled Plastic

MIT undergraduate students have found that, by exposing plastic flakes to small, harmless doses of gamma radiation, then pulverizing the flakes into a fine powder, they can mix the irradiated plastic with cement paste and fly ash to produce concrete that is up to 15 percent stronger than conventional concrete.