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As science enters the world of the very small, researchers will be searching for new ways to study nanoparticles and their properties. For the past several years, scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have been experimenting with new methods for preparing nanoparticles on metal supports, with the aim of creating model catalyst systems to better study the special reactivity of nano-sized catalyst particles.

In the twenty years since the discovery of high-temperature (Tc) superconductors, scientists have been trying to understand the mechanism by which electrons pair up and move coherently to carry electrical current with no resistance. "We are still at the beginning," says Tonica Valla, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who will give a talk on his group's latest results at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

Each year, the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory hosts several high-school and college students, who come to the facility to perform research using its bright beams of x-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared light. This year, four of these students will be presenting the results of their research at the March meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hydrogen-storage materials hold the promise of supporting many exciting new technologies, such as clean, efficient hydrogen fuel cells for automobiles. At the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists are working toward this goal by studying the basic mechanisms that underlie reversible hydrogen storage in certain materials.

In the world of electronic and magnetic devices, the goal is to get smaller. "The smaller space one bit of information can occupy, the more data you can get into a device and the faster it can operate," says Yimei Zhu of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Zhu will present his work assessing the properties of materials that may lead to magneto-electronic devices on the scale of billionths of a meter at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

With the hope of designing more effective treatments for tuberculosis (TB), scientists from the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions have published the first detailed reports on the biochemistry and structure of a protein-cleaving complex that is essential to the TB bacterium's survival.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new, high-throughput technique for identifying the many species of microorganisms living in an unknown "microbial community," -- a method with applications in identifying species useful for cleaning up contamination to distinguishing harmless bacteria from potential bioterror weapons.

If an industrial accident or a terrorist act released dangerous contaminants into the atmosphere in New York City, the city's first responders would have to decide quickly whether people should shelter in place or be evacuated, and what evacuation routes should be considered. In the future they will be aided in making those decisions by information gathered during the New York City Urban Dispersion Program field studies, conducted in the city's urban canyons in March and August of 2005.

Chemists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, working with colleagues at Stony Brook University, have developed a unique experimental technique to measure the flow of energy inside a molecule in the process of breaking apart. The chemists' experiments provide a critical test of theories used in computer models of combustion, which are used, for instance, by combustion engineers to design more fuel-efficient and less polluting machines.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have just launched a web-based 3-D digital atlas browser and database of the brain of a popular laboratory mouse. Neuroscientists around the world can now download these extremely accurate anatomical templates and use them to map other data -- such as which parts of the brain are metabolically active and where particular genes are expressed -- and for making quantitative anatomical comparisons with other, genetically engineered mouse strains.