News By Location

The latest results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the world's most powerful facility for nuclear physics research, strengthen scientists' confidence that RHIC collisions of gold ions have created unusual conditions and that they are on the right path to discover a form of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, believed to have existed in the first microseconds after the birth of the universe.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have received U.S. patent number 6,528,948 for a device that shuts off airflow into a vacuum about one million times faster than mechanical valves or shutters that are currently in use. The new device, called a plasma valve, was developed through research funded by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Battelle of Columbus, Ohio, have joined together in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to determine the structures of microbial proteins, research that may lead to the design of novel anti-microbial drugs. These drugs would be able to stop fungal or bacterial infections in patients whose immune systems are compromised, such as those with cancer or AIDS.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers at Rush Medical College, have demonstrated the effectiveness of a novel x-ray imaging technology to visualize soft tissues of the human foot that are not visible with conventional x-rays.

Toshifumi Sugama of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Keith Gawlik of DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have jointly won a 2003 Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer. This year, the team will be among 22 recipients of the annual award, which recognizes employees who have accomplished outstanding work in the process of transferring a technology developed by a federal laboratory to a commercial marketplace.

William Willis, a senior physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, has won the American Physical Society's (APS) 2003 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. He received the prize, which consists of $5,000 and a certificate citing his contributions to physics, at the APS meeting in Philadelphia on April 6.

Three scientists associated with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory -- Martin Blume, Doon Gibbs, and Denis McWhan -- along with Kazumichi Namikawa of Gakugei University in Tokyo, Japan, have won the 2003 Advanced Photon Source Arthur H. Compton Award. The award recognizes important technical or scientific accomplishments that are beneficial to the Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron light source at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

These selected briefings describe research that Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists will present at the 225th American Chemical Society meeting to be held March 23-27, 2003, in New Orleans, Louisiana. All presentations are in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.

Scientists at Hebrew University and Brookhaven National Laboratory have devised a way to use gold nanoparticles as tiny electrical wires to plug enzymes into electrodes. The gold "nanoplugs" help align the molecules and provide a conductive pathway for the flow of electrons. The research may yield more sensitive, inexpensive, noninvasive detectors for measuring biological molecules, including, potentially, agents of bioterrorism.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory have collaborated with scientists from Bell Laboratories to develop tiny crystal devices capable of correcting digital distortions in high-speed optical communications. Results of this collaboration appear in the December 30, 2002, issue of Applied Physics Letters.