Feature Articles

Scientists at DOE's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working on the Transformational Challenge Reactor, a microreactor built using 3D printing, find their work may revolutionize manufacturing in the nuclear industry -- and in other industries, too.

Argonne researchers lead highly detailed COVID-19 modeling efforts to understand how the virus spreads through populations.

Jean Paul Allain is a professor and department head of the Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering, the director of the Radiation Surface Science and Engineering Laboratory, professor in Biomedical Engineering by courtesy and the Lloyd & Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Plasma Medicine at Penn State University.

In the First-Person Science series, scientists describe how they made significant discoveries over years of research. Esther Takeuchi is a professor at Stony Brook University and the director of the Center for Mesoscale Transport Properties, a Department of Energy Office of Science Energy Frontier Research Center.

Fermilab is upgrading its accelerator complex to produce the world's most powerful beam of high-energy neutrinos. To generate these particles, the accelerators will send proton beams traveling near the speed of light through a maze of accelerator components before passing through metallic "windows" and colliding with a target. Researchers are testing the endurance of windows made of a titanium alloy, exposing samples to high-intensity proton beams to see how the material will perform.

As part of the Department of Energy's Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program, 62 graduate students were chosen to conduct thesis research across the national laboratory complex, including 12 students at Argonne.

An intern at Brookhaven Lab experiments with laser wakefield acceleration -- often called the 'tabletop accelerator.' The goal is to use lasers to accelerate particles to greater energies over shorter distances than can be done with traditional accelerators -- and therefore in a much smaller space.

A technology spun from carbon nanotube sensors discovered 20 years ago by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists could one day help healthcare providers test patients for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

If you have ever taken a walk on the Fermilab hike-and-bike trail along Batavia Road, you've probably noticed large trees with long, slender bean pods, which are ignored by wildlife. Not that long ago, mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths roamed the Fermilab grounds and feasted on these bean pods, along with the fruit of two additional species that still can be found growing on site.

Argonne scientists studied platinum-free catalysts for important fuel cell reactions. The research provides understanding of the mechanisms that make the catalysts effective, and it could inform production of more efficient and cost-effective catalysts.