News By Location

With the birth of the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), the need for better computer simulations became paramount to help ensure that the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile remained safe, reliable, and capable of meeting performance requirements.

Imagine traveling halfway to Jupiter--3.2 billion kilometers--for a small handful of comet dust. That's the mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Stardust spacecraft launched on February 7, 1999. This past January, Stardust flew by Comet Wild 2's nucleus and through a halo of gases and dust at the comet's head, collecting cometary dust particles released from the surface just hours before.

Physicists of antiquity called it one of nature's fundamental elements; third graders know its chemical formula; and all known forms of life need it to exist.

SPEAR3's shutters are open and users are getting their first taste of work with the completely rebuilt synchrotron radiation facility.

Edmond Chow and Christine Orme today will be honored with the 2002 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) as science's foundation for the future.

The DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) announces the publication, in the journal Nature Biotechnology, of a high-quality draft genome sequence of the white rot fungus, Phanerochaete chrysosporium. These are the only known microbes capable of efficiently degrading the recalcitrant aromatic plant polymer lignin, one of the most abundant natural materials on earth. They also have demonstrated the ability to remediate explosive contaminants, pesticides and toxic waste with similar chemical structures to lignin.

In a development that brings the promise of mass production to nanoscale devices, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists have transformed carbon nanotubes into conveyor belts capable of ferrying atom-sized particles to microscopic worksites. By applying a small electrical current, they can move indium particles along the tube like auto parts on an assembly line. The research lays the groundwork for the high-throughput construction of atomic-scale optical, electronic, and mechanical devices.

Researchers at SSRL found magnetic switching speed slower than expected. The collaboration led by SSRL scientists included researchers from Seagate Technology. Magnetic recording is a crucial factor in computer power and multimedia capabilities. This exchange between academia and industry could lead toward understanding the basic physics of data recording and the development of new technologies. The DOE Office of Science supported the research and funds operation of the national user facilities at SLAC.

The 1995 discovery of the top quark may seem quite unrelated to singer Marian Anderson's 1947 rendition of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen." But through an interagency agreement with the Library of Congress, the same high-energy physics technology that's used to study subatomic particles is now helping to restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear.

Robotic Carbon Explorer floats launched by scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory during the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX) tracked a patch of iron-fertilized plankton for weeks through storm-tossed waters, gathering new evidence for the "iron hypothesis." By comparing iron-amended waters with control observations on the hourly-to-daily time scales of marine biological processes, the Carbon Explorers provided the first evidence that atmospheric carbon absorbed by fertilized plankton is fixed through export below 100 meters.