CommUnique: News from the DOE's Office of Science

US Department of Energy Office of Science sent this bulletin at 12/06/2021 03:12 PM EST

6 December 2021

Mountain landscape with brown grasses, trucks driving, and a white weather balloon

Four Steps to Building Better Earth and Climate Models at the Department of Energy

A researcher in the Alaskan tundra walks in snowshoes measuring snow depth with a probe that looks like a high-tech walking stick. In the boggy forests of Minnesota, a researcher measures carbon dioxide and methane in a plot of forest, enclosed and heated to simulate a warmer future. A tethered weather balloon for monitoring the water cycle is launched in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin.

NEWS CENTER

The Office of Science posted 103 science headlines and university and stakeholder news pieces between 11/15/21 and 12/6/21.

A new version of the DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model is two times faster than its earlier version, released in 2018. Using advanced computers, this model simulates aspects of Earth’s variability. It is substantially better at representing precipitation and clouds than previous models. Scientists are using it to anticipate changes that will impact the U.S. energy sector in coming years and inform decision-makers.

A diamond recovered from a mine in Botswana contains a mineral that has long been hypothesized to exist but has never been seen in nature before. The crystals formed deep within the Earth’s mantle and transform into a different phase at ambient conditions. Researchers at Florida State University used X-rays at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory to identify the crystals.

A team at DOE’s Fermilab just demonstrated the world’s fastest magnetic ramping rates (how quickly a magnet can increase a magnetic field) for particle accelerator magnets. These types of magnets are essential to particle physics research. The scientists achieved this record by using magnets made with energy-efficient, high-temperature superconducting material.

While researchers have tried to mimic the ability of marine organisms to stick to surfaces, previous adhesives didn’t stick well enough or weren’t biocompatible. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have engineered microbes that can make the ingredients for an adhesive hydrogel that can be used underwater. It’s as strong as spider silk, sticks as well as mussel foot protein, and is biocompatible for medical uses.

New work led by DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory reports the first structural characterization of bonding between californium and carbon in a molecule. Analyzing molecules like this one has been essential to help scientists understand the chemical properties of metals. This new analysis should provide insights into the chemical bonding and electronic structure of this mysterious element.

Researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso have provided the first detailed look at the structure and function of an enzyme that produces polyketide natural products. These products are compounds found in nature that are widely used in human medicine. This work can help scientists create cheaper and more effective drugs. The scientists used powerful X-rays at three DOE national laboratories to analyze the enzyme.

SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

The Office of Science posted three new highlights between 11/15/2021 and 12/6/2021.

A team of scientists from Ohio State University has discovered an enzyme system in a type of bacteria that produces ethylene without oxygen. These enzymes scavenge sulfur from small volatile organic sulfur compounds. Depending on the compound used, these enzyme reactions produce ethylene, ethane, or methane as a byproduct. This research reveals how this type of enzyme has more functions than we previously realized as well as potential uses for making biofuels. The scientists used the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory DOE Office of Science user facility.

Illustration of a riverbed with grasses with a close up of bacteria and close up of molecules

IN THE NEWS

Gizmodo: The world’s largest digital camera is almost ready to look back in time

The Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera is on the verge of completion at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. It will conduct a 10-year survey of the southern sky that will reveal new insights into dark matter and dark energy.

New York Times: The coronavirus in a tiny drop

To understand how the virus that causes COVID-19 moves between people, scientists used the Summit supercomputer at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to simulate the virus in an aerosol.

NBC News: Sierra Nevada snowpack, a crucial water resource, could disappear in 25 years

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, a major source of water for California, could largely disappear in 25 years if climate change continues at the current pace, according to a study from DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

BASIC TO BREAKTHROUGH

National Laboratories Expanding Access to Cancer-Fighting Radioisotope

Photo of two white women in facial masks and lab goggles/coats in a lab

The radioisotope actinium-225 (Ac-225) has shown great potential in studies for targeting and attacking certain cancer cells. There are multiple clinical trials underway for treatments using Ac-225 and it’s likely the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will approve a treatment in the future.

In the past, there was an extremely limited supply of Ac-225. The only way to produce it was to “milk” it from a supply of thorium-229. But that process didn’t produce enough for large-scale clinical trials.

To solve this problem, DOE has been supporting the Tri-Lab research effort to use accelerators to produce Ac-225. DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Brookhaven National Laboratory have been researching how to produce bigger batches of Ac-225 more efficiently. With these new techniques, they were able to produce about 60 percent of the current yearly supply in just 12 days. All three laboratories are continuing their research and sharing best practices to expand the availability of this essential radioisotope.

END NOTES

Computing Projects Tackling COVID-19 Reveal New Insights

Image that goes from blurry to clear with the right looking like a tangle of ribbon-like structures, with an arrow below it from CRYO-EM to AAMD

DOE’s supercomputing facilities have been essential in powering COVID-19 research. Recently, a team led by the University of California, San Diego simulated the virus in an aerosol on Summit at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. With a new testbed for artificial intelligence at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF, also a user facility), Argonne researchers reduced the time to search through small molecules for usable drugs from years to minutes.

The aerosol simulation as well as two past projects were recently nominated for the Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 research. Using results from cryo-electron microscopy, one study modeled how the virus reproduces at high speed when it invades a host’s cells. The other used a deep-learning model to sort through billions of chemical sequences to find molecules that could block some of the virus’s main protein components.

CommUnique provides a review of recent Office of Science Communications and Public Affairs stories and features. This is only a sample of our recent work promoting research done at universities, national labs, and user facilities throughout the country.

Please see the CommUnique archive on Energy.gov for past issues.

No. 69: 6 December 2021