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

Sun-soaking Device Turns Water Into Superheated Steam

MIT engineers have built a device that soaks up enough heat from the sun to boil water and produce “superheated” steam hotter than 100 degrees Celsius, without any expensive optics.

Joint Appointments Provide Research Flexibility

Northwestern-Argonne partnership fuels interdisciplinary discovery, scientific collaboration, and student research opportunities.

Quantum Information Systems will Revolutionize Computing...as Soon as We Figure Out How to Make Them

A group of researchers led by Northeastern physicist Arun Bansil has received a $3.54 million grant from the Department of Energy to investigate new ways to design quantum information systems, which could revolutionize data encryption, enable new medical treatments, and more accurately model the changing climate.

A New Way to Provide Cooling Without Power

MIT researchers have devised a new way of providing cooling on a hot sunny day, using inexpensive materials and requiring no fossil fuel-generated power. The passive system, which could be used to supplement other cooling systems to preserve food and medications in hot, off-grid locations, is essentially a high-tech version of a parasol.

Physicists Brainstorm World’s 21st-Century Energy Challenges

A team of international scientists led by UC San Diego is working to devise computing hardware capable of functioning as effectively as the human brain.

Discovery Opens the Possibility of Using Sunlight to Turn a Greenhouse Gas into Fuel

A team of scientists has discovered a single-site, visible-light-activated catalyst that converts carbon dioxide (CO2) into “building block” molecules that could be used for creating useful chemicals.

To Understand Watersheds, the Amazon Flood Plain is Her Laboratory

Earth sciences Ph.D. student Emily Burt will advance her research into the Amazon River watershed, studying how sulfur makes its way across the South American continent.

Broad Genome Analysis Shows Yeasts Evolving by Subtraction

A team of researchers led by labs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Vanderbilt University sequenced and compared the genomes of 332 species of budding yeasts, all members of a subphylum of yeasts that multiply by producing daughter cells from buds on their surface.

UMass Engineers Make Crossbar Arrays of the Smallest Memristors

A research team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst says it has developed a promising building block for the next generation of nonvolatile random-access memory, artificial neural networks and bio-inspired computing systems.

Amazonian Peatlands May Soon Switch from a Carbon Sink to a Carbon Source

Researchers at Arizona State University have discovered land-use disturbances may reverse the effect of the most efficient natural carbon sink on the planet.

'Magnetic Topological Insulator' Makes its Own Magnetic Field

A team of U.S. and Korean physicists has found the first evidence of a two-dimensional material that can become a magnetic topological insulator even when it is not placed in a magnetic field.

Researcher Gets Grant To Study Materials Moving Through Tiny Spaces

Dr. Gangli Wang, professor of chemistry at Georgia State University, has received a three-year, $485,263 federal grant to study how nanostructured materials, or materials with hollow structures on the nanometer scale, affect how other substances pass through them.