Feature Articles

Brenden Ortiz, a Wigner Distinguished Staff Fellow at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is helping design the next generation of quantum materials.

A tool developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers gives building owners and equipment manufacturers and installers an easy way to calculate the cost savings of a heating and cooling system that utilizes geothermal energy and emits no carbon.

More realistically representing crops and agricultural practices dramatically improves simulations of carbon and energy exchange.

Chemist Jeff Foster is looking for ways to control sequencing in polymers that could result in designer molecules to benefit a variety of industries, including medicine and energy. Using the technology that he and his colleagues are developing, “scientists can begin to understand how the sequence of monomers influences the behavior and properties of synthetic polymer materials,” said Foster, an Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

To make the experience more engaging for students, Argonne has begun hosting its regional, virtual Science Bowl in a head-to-head setup.

Researchers at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source have used serial crystallography, a way to make molecular movies, to see in real time the mechanisms involved in an enzyme that confers antibiotic resistance to a certain bacterium.

Scientists from Berkeley Lab contributed to landmark climate change reports published between 2018 and 2022. Their research laid the foundation for a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report urging nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.

SLAC researcher Sadasivan Shankar talks about a new environmental effort starting at the lab – building a roadmap that will help researchers improve the energy efficiency of computing, from devices like cellphones to artificial intelligence.

Alice Perrin, a materials scientist and Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, focuses her fellowship research on microstructural changes in nanocrystalline iron and tungsten alloys, which could result in new strategies for material design that resists the detrimental effects of radiation.

Thin oxide films play an important role in electronics and energy storage. Researchers in PNNL’s film growth laboratory create, explore, and improve new thin oxide films.