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31 May 2022
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The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory yesterday earned the top ranking as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
To learn more about Frontier and the technology that enables it to achieve this performance, read the press release from DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Zinc Transport: Researchers at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory just described an important strategy that organisms use when they have limited access to zinc. Zinc helps proteins fold into the right shapes and catalyze reactions. The researchers found a so-called “chaperone” protein that delivers zinc to where it’s needed and identified a “destination” for its deliveries. |
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Supermassive Black Hole: Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The results come from the South Pole Telescope. The telescope's ultrasensitive camera was built by scientists at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Chicago. |
Magnetic Reconnection: Solar flares that can interfere with the electrical grid occur because of magnetic reconnection. It’s when magnetic field lines in space merge and whip apart. Physicists at Dartmouth University have provided the first theoretical description of the interactions between electric currents and magnetic fields that determine the speed of this process. |
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The Mass of a Dark Matter Candidate: Researchers at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have substantially narrowed down the range of the mass of the axion, a hypothetical particle that could be what makes up dark matter. They made this estimate by running a simulation at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center DOE Office of Science user facility. |
Carbon-12 Production in Stars: A team including researchers at Iowa State University has theoretically explained how extreme conditions in stars produce carbon-12. Carbon-12 is an essential precursor to life in the universe. Using computer simulations, the physicists described both the process and the resulting theory for the nuclear structure of carbon. |
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The Office of Science posted three new highlights between 5/17/2022 and 5/31/2022.
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Microbial Habitats in Plants: Stems and leaves of plants release particles such as fungal spores, pollen, bacteria, viruses, algae, and cell debris. Scientists know little about how the microbiome changes throughout a plant’s life cycle. Researchers from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Purdue University, DOE’s Berkeley Lab, and the University of California at Irvine described how biological particles changed over the life cycle of Brachypodium distachyon, a wild grass. This research could help improve our understanding of plant systems and how they interact with the biosphere. |
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Irish Times: Creative collaboration leads to material connections
This feature profiles Sinéad Griffin, staff scientist at the Molecular Foundry DOE Office of Science user facility. She works on developing new materials for micro-electronics and quantum computing.
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Using the Advanced Photon Source to Fight Variants of the Virus Causing COVID-19
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Variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) have caused waves of severe infections and deaths around the globe. In particular, the Omicron variant has an ability to evade currently available vaccines. Scientists focusing on these variants have relied heavily on the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne National Laboratory. The APS allows researchers to examine crystals grown from the proteins of the virus at the atomic level in high resolution. Recently, two teams of researchers using the APS have published important studies. A study from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research helps move forward the development of an antibody cocktail that can protect against variants that can spread more easily, cause more severe disease, and escape the body’s immune response. A different study from the University of Maryland furthers the creation of a broad-spectrum vaccine that could be effective against a wide swath of coronaviruses. |
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Video: ORNL Brings Big Science to Address the Climate Challenge
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Tackling the climate crisis and achieving an equitable clean energy future are among the biggest challenges of our time. Watch this video to find out how DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is invested in the big science capabilities and expertise needed to address the climate challenge on multiple fronts. |
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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.
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