U.S. Department of Energy Research News

Public Release: 1-Aug-2013
August 2013 story tips from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The following are story ideas from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory for August 2013.

Public Release: 1-Aug-2013

Science
CU-Boulder team develops new water splitting technique that could produce hydrogen fuel
A University of Colorado Boulder team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to efficiently split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel.

National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 30-Jul-2013

Applied Physics Letters
Lawrence Livermore engineering team makes breakthrough in solar energy research
The use of plasmonic black metals could someday provide a pathway to more efficient photovoltaics -- the use of solar panels containing photovoltaic solar cells -- to improve solar energy harvesting, according to researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Public Release: 26-Jul-2013
Alternative-energy team wins US Department of Energy poster competition using only small words
Using only cartoons, drawings, photos, and the 1,000 most-commonly-used words in the English language, an alternative-energy team has taken first prize in a US DOE poster contest. The Penn State team's poster, titled "Powering Your Car with Sunlight," was selected as the overall winner out of 31 submissions. The poster explains how energy from the Sun is captured by plants and stored in plant cell walls as energy that could be used to power cars.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 25-Jul-2013

Science
Van Allen Probes pinpoint driver of speeding electrons
Researchers believe they have solved a lingering mystery about how electrons within Earth's radiation belt can suddenly become energetic enough to kill orbiting satellites. Thanks to data gathered from an intrepid pair of NASA probes roaming the harsh space environment within the Van Allen radiation belts, scientists have identified an internal electron accelerator operating within the belts.

Public Release: 25-Jul-2013

PLOS ONE
Microbial who-done-it for biofuels
A multi-institutional collaboration led by researchers with the Joint BioEnergy Institute and Joint Genome Institute has developed a promising technique for identifying microbial enzymes that can effectively deconstruct biomass into fuel sugars under refinery processing conditions.

US Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 19-Jul-2013

Nano Letters
Purple sunlight eaters
A protein found in the membranes of ancient microorganisms that live in desert salt flats could offer a new way of using sunlight to generate environmentally friendly hydrogen fuel, according to a new study by researchers at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 18-Jul-2013
Americans continue to use more renewable energy sources, according to Lawrence Livermore analysis
Americans used more natural gas, solar panels and wind turbines and less coal to generate electricity in 2012, according to the most recent US energy charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Public Release: 18-Jul-2013

Nano Letters
Stanford scientists break record for thinnest light-absorber
Stanford scientists have built the thinnest, most efficient absorber of visible light on record, a nanosize structure that could lead to less-costly, more efficient, solar cells.

US Department of Energy/Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion, Marcus & Amalia Wallenberg Foundation

Public Release: 14-Jul-2013

Nature
Boldly illuminating biology's 'dark matter'
Microbial dark matter comprises the invisible infrastructure of life that can have profound influences on the most significant environmental processes. By employing next generation DNA sequencing of single cell genomes, researchers are systematically filling in the bacterial and archaeal tree of life's uncharted branches. An international collaboration led by the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute has published the most recent findings from exploring microbial dark matter July 14, 2013, in the journal Nature.

US Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 11-Jul-2013

Proceedings of the Royal Society B
50-year-old assumptions about strength muscled aside
New understanding of where muscles get their power from turns 50 years of strength belief on its head. New insight could aid everything from bodybuilding to cardiac care.

Department of Energy, NIH, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 10-Jul-2013
CASL milestone validates reactor model using TVA data
Today, the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) announced that its scientists have successfully completed the first full-scale simulation of an operating nuclear reactor. CASL is modeling nuclear reactors on supercomputers to help researchers better understand reactor performance with much higher reliability than previously available methods, with the goal of ultimately increasing power output, extending reactor life, and reducing waste.

Public Release: 10-Jul-2013
Wind power does not strongly affect greater prairie chickens, 7-year study finds
Wind power development does not ruffle the feathers of greater prairie chicken populations, according to a seven-year study from a Kansas State University ecologist and his team. They found that grassland birds are more affected by rangeland management practices and by the availability of native prairie and vegetation cover at nest sites.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 9-Jul-2013
NREL research earns 3 prestigious R&D 100 Awards
A new energy-efficient approach to building occupancy detection, a better way to detect heat loss in electric-vehicle batteries and a high-efficiency silicon solar cell � all developed or advanced at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory -- have been named among this year's most significant innovations by R&D Magazine.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 9-Jul-2013
SWiFT commissioned to study wind farm optimization
The U.S. Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories and Texas Tech University commissioned the DOE/Sandia Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility today at the Reese Technology Center in Lubbock, Texas. The SWiFT is the first public facility of its kind to use multiple wind turbines to measure how wind turbines interact with one another in a wind farm.

Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Public Release: 2-Jul-2013
July 2013 story tips
These tips are about: ENERGY � Big voltage, little package METALLURGY - Graphite foam expansion ENERGY � CoNNECT promotes savings MATERIALS - Safer batteries CLIMATE - Blogging from the Arctic.

Public Release: 2-Jul-2013

Journal of the American Chemical Society
New catalyst could cut cost of making hydrogen fuel
A discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may represent a significant advance in the quest to create a "hydrogen economy" that would use this abundant element to store and transfer energy.

US Department of Energy/Basic Energy Sciences Program

Public Release: 27-Jun-2013
Power for seaports may be the next job for hydrogen fuel cells
Providing auxiliary hydrogen power to docked or anchored ships may soon be added to the list of ways in which hydrogen fuel cells can provide efficient, emissions-free energy. Hydrogen fuel cells are already powering mobile lighting systems, forklifts, emergency backup systems and light-duty trucks, among other applications. Now, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have found that hydrogen fuel cells may be both technically feasible and commercially attractive as a power source for ships at berth.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 26-Jun-2013

Energy & Environmental Science
Getting the carbon out of emissions
MIT researchers propose method to remove carbon from emissions that could be more efficient than previous systems and easier to retrofit in existing power plants.

Siemens AG, US Department of Energy

Public Release: 26-Jun-2013

PLOS ONE
Salmonella infection is a battle between good and bad bacteria in the gut
A new study in PLOS ONE that examined food poisoning infection as-it-happens in mice revealed harmful bacteria, such as a common type of Salmonella, takes over beneficial bacteria within the gut amid previously unseen changes to the gut environment. The results provide new insights into the course of infection and could lead to better prevention or new treatments.

National Institutes of Health

Public Release: 25-Jun-2013
DOE, NREL announce new research center to boost clean energy technologies on a smarter grid
The Energy Department and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory today announced the Energy Systems Integration Facility in Golden, Colorado, as the latest Energy Department user facility and the only one in the nation focused on utility-scale clean energy grid integration. The facility's first industry partner -- Colorado-based Advanced Energy Industries -- has already signed on to start work at ESIF, developing lower cost, better performing solar power inverters.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 25-Jun-2013

IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference
NREL reports 31.1 percent efficiency for III-V solar cell
The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Lab has announced a world record of 31.1 percent conversion efficiency for a two-junction solar cell under one sun of illumination.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 25-Jun-2013
NREL drives toward the future with fuel cell EVs
Efforts currently underway at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory are contributing to rapid progress in the research, development and testing of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 19-Jun-2013

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Less is more: Novel cellulose structure requires fewer enzymes to process biomass to fuel
Improved methods for breaking down cellulose nanofibers are central to cost-effective biofuel production and the subject of new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Scientists are investigating the unique properties of crystalline cellulose nanofibers to develop novel chemical pretreatments and designer enzymes for biofuel production from cellulosic -- or non-food -- plant-derived biomass.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 19-Jun-2013

Molecular Systems Biology
Expressly unfit for the laboratory
A new Berkeley Lab study challenges the orthodoxy of microbiology, which holds that in response to environmental changes, bacterial genes will boost production of needed proteins and decrease production of those that aren't. The study found that for bacteria in the laboratory there was little evidence of adaptive genetic response.

US Department of Energy