U.S. Department of Energy Research News

Public Release: 14-Nov-2012
Bug repellent for supercomputers proves effective
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have used the Stack Trace Analysis Tool, a highly scalable, lightweight tool to debug a program running more than one million MPI processes on the IBM Blue Gene/Q-based Sequoia supercomputer.

Public Release: 14-Nov-2012
Traumatic brain injury patients, supercomputer simulations studied to improve helmets
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico are comparing supercomputer simulations of blast waves on the brain with clinical studies of veterans suffering from mild traumatic brain injuries to help improve helmet designs.

Office of Naval Research

Public Release: 13-Nov-2012

Supercomputing 2012
PNNL expertise highlighted at Supercomputing
PNNL research describing new and improved ways to crunch massive amounts of data will be presented at the Supercomputing 2012 conference. Papers to be presented include how to use matching approximation to find similar patterns in different data sets and a new software that helps speed up parallel computations by automatically translating MPI code.

Public Release: 13-Nov-2012
Department of Energy's ESnet rolls out world's fastest science network
The US Department of Energy's (DOE) ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is now operating the world's fastest science network, serving the entire national laboratory system, its supercomputing centers, and its major scientific instruments at 100 gigabits per second -- 10 times faster than its previous generation network.

Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 13-Nov-2012

Astronomy & Astrophysics
BOSS quasars unveil a new era in the expansion history of the universe
Using the "Lyman-alpha forests" of tens of thousands of quasar spectra, the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has measured the large-scale structure of the early universe for the first time. No other technique can reach back over 10 billion years to probe baryon oscillations at a time when the expansion of the universe was still decelerating and dark energy was yet to turn on.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, SDSS-III Participating Institutions, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 12-Nov-2012

Advanced Functional Materials
'Strain tuning' reveals promise in nanoscale manufacturing
ORNL researcher combined theoretical and experimental studies to understand and control the self-assembly of insulating barium zirconium oxide nanodots and nanorods within barium-copper-oxide superconducting films.

Public Release: 12-Nov-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A better route to xylan
JBEI researchers have identified a gene in rice plants whose suppression improves both the extraction of xylan and the overall release of the sugars needed to make biofuels.

US Department of Energy/Office of Science

Public Release: 12-Nov-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Erosion has a point -- and an edge, NYU researchers find
Erosion caused by flowing water does not only smooth out objects, but can also form distinct shapes with sharp points and edges, a team of New York University researchers has found. Their findings reveal the unexpected ways that erosion can affect landscapes and artificial materials.

US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 11-Nov-2012

Nature Photonics
Study provides recipe for 'supercharging' atoms with X-ray laser
Researchers using a free-electron X-ray laser have found a way to strip most of the electrons from xenon atoms, creating a "supercharged," strongly positive state at energies previously thought too low.

US Department of Energy/Office of Science

Public Release: 8-Nov-2012

Nature
More bang for the biofuel buck
Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that a fermentation process used in World War I to make cordite for bullets and artillery shells, in combination with a modern palladium catalyst could produce gasoline, diesel or jet fuel from the sugars found in biomass.

Energy Biosciences Institute

Public Release: 8-Nov-2012

Science
Nanocrystals and nickel catalyst substantially improve light-based hydrogen production
Hydrogen is an attractive fuel source because it can easily be converted into electric energy and gives off no greenhouse emissions. A group of chemists at the University of Rochester is adding to its appeal by increasing the output and lowering the cost of current light-driven hydrogen-production systems.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 6-Nov-2012
Global metabolomic initiative announced
Investigators at Washington University and The Scripps Research Institute have announced the launch of a "Global Metabolomic Initiative" to facilitate meta-analyses on studies of the metabolism of bacteria, yeast, plants, animals and people. Although metabolomics has existed as a discipline for only a decade, it has already provided insights into many difficult-to-treat diseases, including chronic pain. Many more are expected to fall out of the meta-analyses.

National Institutes of Health, US Department of Energy, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Public Release: 5-Nov-2012
November 2012 story tips
Scientists have found that rising levels of ozone may amplify the impacts of higher temperatures and reduce streamflow from forests to rivers, streams and other water bodies. Recommendations to accelerate climate modeling to learn more about climate's regional ramifications and future effects. Research project to continue, providing additional data that could make houses of tomorrow even better. Ethanol blends of 10 to 25 percent could potentially have more fuel pump compatibility issues than higher blends.

Public Release: 5-Nov-2012

Nature Chemistry
Researchers make strides toward selective oxidation catalysts
Solid catalysts tend to be highly reactive, but more efficient chemical processes require that catalysts be more scrupulous about their reactants. Now Northwestern University researchers have a new method for making selective oxidation catalysts, a step that could lead to greener energy.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 1-Nov-2012

Cell Reports
Berkeley Lab scientists help develop promising therapy for Huntington's disease
There's new hope in the fight against Huntington's disease. Berkeley Lab scientists have helped design a compound that suppresses symptoms of the devastating disease in mice. The compound is a synthetic antioxidant that targets mitochondria, an organelle that serves as a cell's power plant. Oxidative damage to mitochondria is implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases.

Public Release: 31-Oct-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Folding funnels key to biomimicry
Berkeley Lab researchers have shown that a concept widely accepted as describing the folding of a single individual protein is also applicable to the self-assembly of multiple proteins. Their findings provide important guidelines for future biomimicry efforts, particularly for device fabrication and nanoscale synthesis.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 29-Oct-2012
ORNL debuts Titan supercomputer
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second--or 20 petaflops--by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar.

Public Release: 25-Oct-2012

Nature Communications
A 'nanoscale landscape' controls flow of surface electrons on a topological insulator
Boston College physicists report new insights into the behavior of electrons on the surface of a topological insulator, a class of material with unique properties that challenge some of the oldest laws of physics.

National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012
Reclaiming rare earths
Recycling keeps paper, plastics, and even jeans out of landfills. Could recycling rare-earth magnets do the same? Perhaps, if the recycling process can be improved. Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory are working to more effectively remove the neodymium, a rare earth element, from the mix of other materials in a magnet. Initial results show recycled materials maintain the properties that make rare-earth magnets useful.

Department of Energy's Office of Science

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012
Americans use more efficient and renewable energy technologies
Americans used less energy in 2011 than in the previous year due mainly to a shift to higher-efficiency energy technologies in the transportation and residential sectors. Meanwhile, less coal was used but more natural gas was consumed according to the most recent energy flow charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Public Release: 24-Oct-2012

Physical Review Letters
Measuring Table-Top Accelerators� State-of-the-Art Beams
Accurate tests of the beam quality of laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) assume new importance with the approaching advent of the one-meter-long, 10-billion-electron-volt Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), bringing the promise of "table-top accelerators" closer to realization. Accelerator scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have devised novel techniques for characterizing extraordinarily short beam pulses in the complex environment of LPAs, including the metric known as slice-energy spread.

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

Nature Communications
High-pressure science gets super-sized
The study of materials at extreme conditions took a giant leap forward with the discovery of a way to generate super high pressures without using shock waves whose accompanying heat turns solids to liquid. This discovery will allow scientists for the first time to reach static pressure levels exceeding four million atmospheres, a high-pressure environment where new unique compounds could be formed, materials change their chemical and physical properties, and metals become insulators.

National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

Nature Materials
New finding could pave way to faster, smaller electronics
UC Davis researchers for the first time have looked inside gallium manganese arsenide, a type of material known as a "dilute magnetic semiconductor" that could open up an entirely new class of faster, smaller devices based on an emerging field known as "spintronics."

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012

ACS Synthetic Biology
Training your robot the PaR-PaR way
PaR-PaR, a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language developed by researchers at JBEI and Berkeley Lab, uses an object-oriented approach to make it easier to integrate robotic equipment into biological laboratories. Effective robots can increase research productivity, lower costs and provide more reliable and reproducible experimental data.

US Department of Energy/Office of Science

Public Release: 23-Oct-2012
Neutron experiments give unprecedented look at quantum oscillations
Researchers at ORNL have found that nitrogen atoms in the compound uranium nitride exhibit unexpected, distinct vibrations that form a nearly ideal realization of a physics textbook model known as the isotropic quantum harmonic oscillator.