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Céline Bonfils : Then and Now / 2012 Early Career Award Winner

DOE/US Department of Energy

Physicist Céline Bonfils studies the multiple influences affecting climate change. Her team identified these “fingerprints” in historical climate simulations to help separate the signals from the noise in observations.

Department of Energy awards 18 million node-hours of computing time to support cutting-edge research

DOE/US Department of Energy
Grant and Award Announcement

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that 18 million node-hours have been awarded to 45 scientific projects under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) program. The projects, with applications ranging from advanced energy systems to climate change to cancer research, will use DOE supercomputers to uncover unique insights about scientific problems that would otherwise be impossible to solve using experimental approaches.

Investigating the dynamics that reshape permafrost environments

DOE/US Department of Energy

Researchers using monitoring data from Alaska permafrost found that vegetation and the snowpack that accumulates in winter control the temperatures below ground and thus the flow of water in the ground. By highlighting the link between above- and belowground properties and processes, these results will help improve scientists’ predictions of how the Arctic interacts with overall climate change.

Journal: Geophysical Research Letters

Innovative ferroelectric material could enable next-generation memory devices

DOE/US Department of Energy

Ferroelectric materials based on the element hafnium show promise for data storage devices. They offer high speed, durability, lower operating power, and the ability to retain data when power is turned off. This research developed an innovative bulk hafnia-based ferroelectric material. Experiments with the material produced the first experimental evidence of room-temperature ferroelectricity in crystals made of a hafnium-based compound, bulk yttrium doped hafnium dioxide.

Journal: Nature Materials

Watching plant roots grow in a transparent simulated soil

DOE/US Department of Energy

The rhizosphere, the underground ecological zone between and around plant roots, is difficult to study. Scientists have now developed a rhizosphere-on-a-chip with a transparent simulated soil structure that allows researchers to view how roots grow over time through the pores in the soil. Paired with specialized mass spectrometry techniques, scientist can also use the rhizosphere-on-a-chip to map the location of root-exuded molecules, like amino acids, without hurting the plant.

Journal: Lab on a Chip

Energy Secretary Granholm announces 2021 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award winners

DOE/US Department of Energy
Grant and Award Announcement

Today, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced ten U.S. scientists and engineers as recipients of the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for their exceptional contributions in research and development supporting the Energy Department’s missions in science, energy, and national security. Established in 1959, the Lawrence Award recognizes mid-career U.S. scientists and engineers who have advanced new research and scientific discovery in nine categories representing the broad science and engineering missions of DOE and its programs. The awards are among the longest running and most prestigious science and technology awards bestowed by the U.S. Government.

Converting methane to methanol—with and without water

DOE/US Department of Energy

Adding water to the catalytic reaction that converts methane into useful methanol makes the process more effective, but it creates challenges for industry due to steam from the water. Now scientists have identified a common industrial catalyst, copper-zinc oxide, that completes the conversion along different pathways depending on whether water is present or not. This could potentially keep methane, a potent greenhouse gas, out of Earth’s atmosphere and instead turn it into useful products.

Journal: Journal of the American Chemical Society

A new approach produces a 90-fold increase in known viral taxa

DOE/US Department of Energy

Viruses play an essential role in regulating microbiomes. However, the use of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics have produced taxonomies of only a tiny proportion of the world’s viruses. In this study, researchers used a novel algorithm to compare and incorporate 715,672 metagenome viruses from environmental samples around the world. This expands the viral taxa available to researchers from about 8,000 to 723,672. The scientists then used the data to examine samples from two Populus tree genotypes.

Journal: Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal

Direct neutrino-mass measurement achieves new, sub-electronvolt sensitivity

DOE/US Department of Energy

The international KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment in Germany recently reported a new upper limit on the mass of the neutrino. This limit—0.8 electronvolts (eV)—is the lowerst scientists have achieved. As the results are confirmed and refined, they will help scientists better understand the neutrino and its role in the evolution of the universe.

Journal: Nature Physics

Andreas Kemp: Then and Now / 2012 Early Career Award Winner

DOE/US Department of Energy

At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Andreas Kemp studies the interaction of intense, extremely short laser pulses with matter. This new field of research studies extreme nuclear physics reactions at rates far higher than those of current accelerator experiments.

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