Feature Articles

Thanks to a recent upgrade to the medical isotope facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory, actinium-225 (Ac-225), an isotope that shows great promise for treating cancer, can now be produced, purified, and shipped ready for use directly from the Lab. The first shipment left Brookhaven in mid-March. This upgrade will streamline the overall production and distribution of Ac-225 to research centers.

Can the nuclear industry use extended reality tools to improve digital operations and maintenance? Engineers at Argonne’s Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility investigate.

Argonne and DOE pose a fun new series of challenges to students interested in developing critical cybersecurity skills.

Using disinformation to create political instability and battlefield confusion dates back millennia. However, today’s disinformation actors use social media to amplify disinformation that users knowingly or, more often, unknowingly perpetuate. Such disinformation spreads quickly, threatening public health and safety. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic and recent global elections have given the world a front-row seat to this form of modern warfare. A group at ORNL now studies such threats thanks to the evolution at the lab of location intelligence, or research that uses open data to understand places and the factors that influence human activity in them. In the past, location intelligence has informed emergency response, urban planning, transportation planning, energy conservation and policy decisions. Now, location intelligence at ORNL also helps identify disinformation, or shared information that is intentionally misleading, and its impacts.

The Advanced Photon Source is about to undergo a comprehensive upgrade, one that will require a one-year pause in operations. When the APS returns to operation in 2024, its brighter X-ray beams will lead to new breakthroughs in many different areas for decades to come.

To accelerate development of useful new materials, researchers at Berkeley Lab are building a new kind of automated lab that uses robots guided by artificial intelligence. A-Lab will rapidly test whether materials that have been computationally predicted can be made in reality. The lab’s vision is to use AI to discover materials of the future, starting with a focus on materials for batteries and energy storage.

To shield steel from the corrosive threats posed by sea air, Sandia National Laboratories researchers tested a variety of nickel mixtures as protective coatings on stainless steel. The researchers found that the specific material applied, and the specific application process used, impacted the properties of the coating, including how protective it was against corrosion.

Argonne’s newest supercomputer, Polaris, is up and running, and scientists using the Advanced Photon Source are already seeing faster data analysis. While the combination is paying dividends now, it points toward an upgraded APS and an even better supercomputer called Aurora.

The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University today announced the launch of a new joint battery center at SLAC. It will bring together the resources and expertise of the national lab, the university and Silicon Valley to accelerate the deployment of batteries and other energy storage solutions as part of the energy transition that’s essential for addressing climate change.

In ideal manufacturing, 3D printing reduces waste, uses less energy and produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions. An entrepreneur and scientist at Argonne National Laboratory are working together to make this future ideal a reality.