U.S. Department of Energy Research News

Showing stories 376-400 out of 429 stories.
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1-Oct-2001
A giant among us
Klaus Ruedenberg, an Ames Laboratory senior associate and an Iowa State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, has been chosen to receive the prestigious American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry.

1-Oct-2001
Gravity in large extra dimensions
n 1998, Nima Arkani-Hamed found himself pondering one of the conundrums of modern physics: why is gravity so much weaker than the other fundamental forces? Surrounded by massive objects like falling apples, orbiting moons, and our own occasionally clumsy bodies, we don't think of gravity as weak. Compared to electromagnetism, however-or the aptly named strong force that binds quarks, or even the "weak" force that governs some forms of radioactive decay-gravity is feeble.

1-Oct-2001
Travels of a young physicist
A young physicist recounts his career from the University of California at Berkeley and the laboratories of Alexander Pines, famed pioneer in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

1-Oct-2001
Tiny particles cause big stir
Emitted as the result of thermonuclear reactions in the core of the sun and supernovae, the ghostlike elementary particles called "neutrinos" usually travel unnoticed through space, in immense numbers and across vast distances. However, the discovery that these erstwhile phantoms have mass and are polymorphous generated substantial notice from the media on Earth.

1-Oct-2001
Microtools for the nanoworld
Most of what we call nanotechnology involves hundreds or thousands of atoms but in a nanometer there's enough room for three atoms. If we are going to achieve real nanotechnology, we are going to have to learn how to put atoms together one at a time.

1-Oct-2001
Beyond alchemy and the Wright brothers: Nanosecrets of everyday things
t's their nanostructure that makes many crucial materials useful, and chemical processes essential to everyday life routinely do their work on the nanoscale. There's a lot more to nanoscience than building itty-bitty widgets. Catalysts are "helper" substances that promote chemical reactions without themselves being consumed. Nature's catalysts, enzymes, assemble only specific end products. Industrial catalysts are rarely so precise.

1-Oct-2001
Dendrimers: Branching out into realms of molecular architecture
Dendrimers may well become the flagship of nanotechnology's building blocks, a class of polymerized macromolecules that have the potential to provide the most exquisitely tailored forms and functions ever realized outside of nature.

1-Oct-2001
Nanotubes: Superhard, superstrong, super useful
Not only do nanotubes offer a full range of electrical and thermal conductivity properties (they conduct heat better than any other known material), they're also about a hundred times stronger than steel and more durable than diamonds. Their potential for use in electronics is nothing short of mind-boggling: if all the nanotubes that could be packed into a one-half-inch cube were to be laid out end to end, they would stretch some 250,000 miles.

1-Oct-2001
The coming of the nano-age
The emerging field of nanotechnology promises to change the way almost everything�from vaccines to computers�is designed and made.

1-Oct-2001
Nanocrystals: The shape of things to come
Nanocrystals are particularly attractive as building blocks for larger structures because it's possible - even easy - to prepare nanocrystals that are highly perfect.

28-Sep-2001
The last universal physicist
On the occasion of his one hundredth birthday, we honor a great scientist who was born in Italy, made immense and lasting contributions to the birth of modern physics, and emigrated to the United States, where he carried out experiments and theoretical studies that ushered in the atomic age.

17-Sep-2001
Long-life rechargeable batteries
If you're tired of cell phones and laptops that quickly lose their charge�or worse, their ability to be recharged�help may be on the way. Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists James Reilly, Gordana Adzic, John Johnson, Thomas Vogt, and James McBreen have developed a new metal alloy that could greatly improve the performance of rechargeable batteries.

14-Sep-2001
Tools for healing
Discoveries in physics have helped forge dramatic advances in cancer treatment for over a century. In 1950-54, according to the National Cancer Institute, the five-year survival rate for all cancers was 35 percent; by 2000 it was 59 percent. With early detection and treatment, the five-year survival rate for screenable cancers is now 80 percent.

14-Sep-2001
Tools for the future
The future of accelerator physics isn't just for physicists. As in the past, tomorrow's discoveries in particle accelerator science may lead to unexpected applications for medical diagnosis, healing and the understanding of human biology.

14-Sep-2001
Tools for biomedical research
At the forefront of biomedical research, medical scientists use particle accelerators to explore the structure of biological molecules. They use the energy that charged particles emit when accelerated to nearly the speed of light to create one of the brightest lights on earth, 30 times more powerful than the sun and focused on a pinpoint.

14-Sep-2001
Neutrons against cancer
The idea to build a Neutron Therapy Facility at Fermilab developed in the early 1970s when physicians and physicists shared a vision: to wield accelerator technology to combat cancer. Today, more than 3,100 patients have come to Fermilab in the hope of finding a cure for some of the worst tumors known in the medical field.

14-Sep-2001
Tools for diagnosis
Advances in technology for medical diagnosis have created extraordinary new capabilities for imaging the human body. Many of medicine's most powerful diagnostic tools incorporate technology that physicists originally developed to explore the fundamental nature of matter.

14-Sep-2001
Interdependent sciences: Physics and medicine
Many diagnostic and therapeutic techniques that have revolutionized medicine are also symbols of the interdependence of the physical and biomedical sciences. Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Neutron Therapy are just two of the prominent examples of the successful collaboration among innovative medical researchers, physical scientists and engineers.

10-Sep-2001
Nanotemplates for nanostructures
Coffee beans spilled upon a table form no pattern�they're a mess�their distribution dictated by the laws of chance. The same was generally believed true of atoms deposited upon a substrate. The first vision of a peaceable kingdom in which deposited atoms form orderly, controllable 2-D nanopatterns has been observed by researchers at the Sandia National Laboratories.

1-Sep-2001
Insuring safety in future nuclear power systems
A research project to help ensure the safety of future nuclear power systems is being awarded $940,000 funding for a three-phase project under the Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Research Initiative.

27-Aug-2001
Brookhaven physicists produce 'doubly strange nuclei'
Strange science has taken a great leap forward at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. There, physicists have produced a significant number of "doubly strange nuclei," or nuclei containing two strange quarks.

26-Aug-2001
University of Michigan wins the great solar car race
The University of Michigan's solar car, M-Pulse, cruised to victory in the American Solar Challenge on July 25, crossing the finish line at 11:37 a.m., after traveling 2,300 miles using only the energy of the sun.

20-Aug-2001
New lens could help find cancer tumors earlier
The new lens technology, developed by scientists at Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, uses gamma rays diffracted by a set of 828 copper crystal cubes arranged in 13 concentric rings in a disk slightly smaller than a dinner plate. The lens focuses the gamma radiation emitted from a small radioactive source in the body of a patient into a small, well-shielded detector.

20-Aug-2001
Mysterious material has unusual electrical properties
In the July 27, 2001, issue of Science magazine, the scientists describe findings that offer the first clues to explain the material's newly discovered, unusual electrical properties. This work may lead to applications using the material to store electrical charge in high-performance capacitors, and offer insight into how charges behave on the nanoscale-on the order of billionths of a meter.

2-Aug-2001
New magnetic semiconductor material spins hope for quantum computing
The future of quantum computing offers the potential for substantially greater data storage and faster processing speeds, but its advancement has been limited by the absence of certain critically important materials�in particular, a semiconductor that is magnetic at room temperature. Now, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have created a semiconductor material that has superior magnetic properties at room temperature.

Showing stories 376-400 out of 429 stories.
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