U.S. Department of Energy Research News

Public Release: 29-Nov-2012
Lawrence Livermore's Keane and Long elected AAAS Fellows
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Christopher Keane and Jane Long have been awarded the distinction of fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Public Release: 29-Nov-2012

Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences
A human-caused climate change signal emerges from the noise
By comparing simulations from 20 different computer models to satellite observations, Lawrence Livermore climate scientists and colleagues from 16 other organizations have found that tropospheric and stratospheric temperature changes are clearly related to human activities.

Public Release: 28-Nov-2012
NREL updates solar radiation database
The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and collaborators released a 20-year updated version of the US National Solar Radiation Database, a web-based technical report that provides critical information about solar and meteorological data for 1,454 locations in the US and its territories.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 28-Nov-2012

Nature
Tiny algae shed light on photosynthesis as a dynamic property
Many of the world's most important photosynthetic eukaryotes such as plants got their light-harnessing organelles (chloroplasts) indirectly from other organisms through endosymbiosis. In some instances, this resulted in algae with multiple, distinct genomes, some in residual organelles (nucleomorphs). To better understand why nucleomorphs persist after endosymbiosis, an international team including researchers at the DOE Joint Genome Institute collaborated to sequence and analyze two tiny algae. Their report appeared online Nov. 29, 2012 in Nature.

Public Release: 15-Nov-2012

Environmental Science and Technology
Airborne particles smuggle pollutants to far reaches of globe
Pollution from fossil fuel burning and forest fires reaches all the way to the Arctic, even though it should decay long before it travels that far. Now, lab research can explain how pollution makes its lofty journey: rather than ride on the surface of airborne particles, pollutants snuggle inside, protected from the elements on the way. The results will help scientists improve atmospheric air-quality and pollution transport models.

Department of Energy

Public Release: 15-Nov-2012
LLNL scientists assist in building detector to search for elusive dark matter material
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers are making key contributions to a physics experiment that will look for one of nature's most elusive particles, "dark matter," using a tank nearly a mile underground beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota.

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: 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: 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: 21-Oct-2012

Nature Climate Change
Rice agriculture accelerates global warming, new research finds
More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, coupled with rising temperatures, is making rice agriculture a larger source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, according to a study published today in Nature Climate Change by a research team that includes a University of California, Davis, plant scientist.

US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Irish Research Council, Marie Curie Actions

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012

Environmental Health Perspectives
Elevated indoor carbon dioxide impairs decision-making performance
Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people's decision-making performance. The results were unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces with high occupant density.

State University of New York

Public Release: 17-Oct-2012
From form to function: 2013 DOE JGI Community Sequencing Program portfolio announced
For genomics researchers, the term "form to function" could be applied to the ongoing transition from not just studying an organism's genetic code to also understanding the roles those genes play. All the projects selected for the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute's 2013 Community Sequencing Program portfolio combine sequence data generation with large-scale experimental and computational capabilities to enable fuller functional genome annotation.

US Department of Energy Office of Science

Public Release: 16-Oct-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Jelly-like atmospheric particles resist chemical aging
"Our research provides the first experimental evidence that the chemical aging process of atmospheric particles is limited by phase," says principal investigator Scot Martin, at Harvard.

US Department of Energy, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Public Release: 16-Oct-2012
SDSU receives Department of Energy grant for solar research
The grant, from the SunShot Initiative, will enable Dr. Fletcher Miller and his team of graduate and undergraduate student researchers to take a lab-scale model and, over the next four years, develops a full-scale model that will be tested at the National Solar Thermal Testing Facility in New Mexico.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 11-Oct-2012

Climatic Change
Earth sunblock only needed if planet warms easily
A new computer analysis of future climate change that considers emissions reductions together with sunlight reduction shows that such drastic steps to cool the earth would only be necessary if the planet heats up easily with added greenhouse gases. The analysis, reported in the journal Climatic Change, might help future policymakers plan for a changing climate.

Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research

Public Release: 8-Oct-2012

Nature Methods
A welcome predictability
Berkeley Lab researchers have developed an adapator that makes the genetic engineering of microbial components substantially easier and more predictable.

National Science Foundation

Public Release: 8-Oct-2012

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Adaptable button mushroom serves up genes critical to managing the planet's carbon stores
The button mushroom occupies a prominent place in our diet; in nature, Agaricus bisporus decays leaf matter on the forest floor. An international collaboration led by the French institute INRA and the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute has determined the full repertoire of A. bisporus genes. Their report shows the metabolic strategies of Agaricus might not be present in white-rot and brown-rot fungi and suggests implications for forest carbon management.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 1-Oct-2012

Nature Climate Change
Climate change cripples forests
Combine the tree-ring growth record with historic information, climate records and projections of future climate trends, and you get a grim picture for the future of trees in the southwestern United States. That's the word from a team of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the US Geological Survey, University of Arizona, and others. In the warmer and drier Southwest of the near future, widespread tree mortality will cause forest and species distributions to change substantially.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 1-Oct-2012
Yearlong MAGIC climate study launches
A Horizon Lines container ship outfitted with meteorological and atmospheric instruments installed by US Department of Energy scientists from Argonne National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory will begin taking data today for a yearlong mission aimed at improving the representation of clouds in climate models.

Department of Energy's Office of Science

Public Release: 30-Sep-2012

Nature Climate Change
Climate change could cripple southwestern forests
Combine the tree-ring growth record with historical information, climate records, and computer-model projections of future climate trends, and you get a grim picture for the future of trees in the southwestern United States, according to a new study to be published in Nature Climate Change.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation

Public Release: 28-Sep-2012
Songs in the key of sea
Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have used special algorithms to create musical patterns from data collected from microbes in the western English Channel.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 28-Sep-2012
UA engineering leads $5.5 million DOE project to create low-cost solar energy
Solar power may be clean and renewable, but solar panels are inefficient and do not work at night. Could concentrated solar power be the salty solution?

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 27-Sep-2012

Plant Physiology
'Semi-dwarf' trees may enable a green revolution for some forest crops
The same "green revolution" concepts that have revolutionized crop agriculture and helped to feed billions of people around the world may now offer similar potential in forestry, scientists say, with benefits for wood, biomass production, drought stress and even greenhouse gas mitigation.

National Science Foundation, US Department of Energy, US Department of Agriculture

Public Release: 27-Sep-2012

Science
Uranium-contaminated site yields wealth of information on microbes 10 feet under
At sites contaminated with heavy metals, remediation often involves feeding the naturally occurring bacteria in the soil to encourage them to turn soluble metals into solids that won't leech into aquifers and streams. To find out what these microbes are doing, UC Berkeley scientists performed a metagenomic analysis of the underground microbial community at one former uranium mill site in Colorado, assigning more than 150,000 sequenced genes to 80 bacteria and Archaea.

US Department of Energy

Public Release: 24-Sep-2012
Most biofuels are not 'green'
First tops, then flops. That is one way of summing up the history of biofuels so far. A new study led by Empa gives an up-to-date picture of the ecobalance of various biofuels and their production processes. Only a few are overall more environmentally friendly than petrol.

Swiss Federal Authorities, US Department of Energy