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

New Method to Detect Ultrasound with Light

Developed by Northwestern Engineering scientists, a tiny, transparent device that can fit into a contact lens, called the Micro-ring resonator detector, can determine the speed of the blood flow and the oxygen metabolic rate at the back of the eye.

UMD Physicist Improves Method for Designing Fusion Experiments

A University of Maryland physicist has made an important revision to software tools used to design stellarators, which will balance tradeoffs between the ideal magnetic field shape and potential coil shapes, leaving more space between the coils for repair access and sensor placement.

Researchers Develop Best-Yet Cell Culture System for Age-Related Macular Degeneration

An international team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and University College London and Queens University Belfast in the United Kingdom developed a cell culture model that could help to develop earlier treatment strategies for age-related macular degeneration, the third most prevalent cause of vision loss worldwide.

Rice University Takes Deeper Look at Unconventional Oil and Gas

Rice engineers George Hirasaki and Walter Chapman are leading an effort to better characterize the contents of organic shale by combining standard nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) – the same technology used by hospitals to see inside human bodies – with molecular dynamics simulations.

Penn Researchers Are Among the First to Grow a Versatile Two-dimensional Material

University of Pennsylvania researchers are now among the first to produce a single, three-atom-thick layer of a unique two-dimensional material called tungsten ditelluride. Their findings have been published in 2-D Materials.

Controlled Atomic Disorder Helps Researchers Understand Superconductivity

Ruslan Prozorov, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University and faculty scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Ames Laboratory, and his research group are using disorder in crystal structure to understand the mechanisms of superconductivity — conducting electricity without resistance, in other words, without any loss of energy to heat.

Scientists Discover New Helium Chemistry

An international team of researchers led by Skoltech’s Artem R. Oganov (also a professor at Stony Brook University and head of Computational Materials Discovery laboratory at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology) has predicted two stable helium compounds—Na₂He and Na₂He O.

Stanford Engineers Create a Low-Cost Battery for Storing Renewable Energy

A battery made with urea, commonly found in fertilizers and mammal urine, could provide a low-cost way of storing energy produced through solar power or other forms of renewable energy for consumption during off hours.

Atomic-Scale View of Bacterial Proteins Offers Path to New Tuberculosis Drugs

With the first detailed analysis of a cellular component from a close relative of the pathogen that causes tuberculosis, Rockefeller scientists are suggesting strategies for new drugs to curb this growing health problem.

Husker Scientists Boost Performance of Emerging Nanomaterial

Scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Drexel University demonstrated that modifying the traditional method of synthesizing MXene sheets created defect-free flakes that were about 25 times larger, significantly more conductive, and far less susceptible to degradation.

Catalyzing Discovery

Researchers at the Energy Frontier Research Center’s (EFRC) Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis (IMASC) at Harvard have shown that the process of catalysis is more dynamic than previously imagined, and that molecular forces can vastly influence the process.

Paper Spotlights Key Flaw in Widely Used Radioisotope Dating Technique

An oversight in a radioisotope dating technique used to date everything from meteorites to geologic samples means that scientists have likely overestimated the age of many samples, according to new research from North Carolina State University.