|
23 January 2023
|
|
The Early Career Research Program provides financial support that is foundational to early career investigators, enabling them to define and direct independent research in areas important to Department of Energy (DOE) missions. The Early Career Award Winner series provides awardees with an opportunity to explain the results of their research in their own words.
In our daily lives, there is always uncertainty or lack of certainty due to lack of information and knowledge. When making decisions, we all want to quantify and reduce uncertainty.
This is also the case in Earth and environmental sciences because Earth and environmental systems are open and complex. So, when studying these systems, we need to quantify and reduce uncertainty to support science-informed decisions for many important issues such as energy safety and environmental sustainability. With information of uncertainty, risks of the decisions can also be estimated for policymaking.
Learn how the Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Research Program Award allowed Ming Ye to develop interdisciplinary approaches to quantify and reduce uncertainty in environmental studies.
|
|
New type of entanglement: Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (an Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven Lab), scientists have discovered a new type of quantum entanglement. They measured two particles with different charges that showed patterns that they were entangled. Most observations of entanglement in the past were between identical particles. Entanglement (when particles are in sync across distances) could be important for developing quantum technology. |
Biofilm production: Certain bacteria form biofilms that allow them to resist antibiotics. These biofilms are largely made of cellulose. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have observed how a single bacterial enzyme (BcsAB) enables the production of cellulose at the molecular level. They found that temperature has a large effect on how fast the cellulose grows and discovered the cellulose's structure. This could help scientists develop treatments that target biofilm production. |
|
Planet, star, and black hole formation: The clouds of dust and plasma that collapse and form planets, stars, and massive black holes seem to contradict an essential principle of astrophysics - that centrifugal force counterbalances gravity. While theorists predicted an explanation for this phenomenon in 1991, researchers at DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory confirmed it in the lab for the first time. |
Carbon capture: Engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago have built a machine that captures carbon from flue gas and converts it to ethylene. Ethylene is a major chemical that is used to produce plastic as well as other chemicals used in a variety of applications. The system removes more carbon from the environment than it generates. |
|
Amazonian trees: Scientists at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that more extreme thunderstorms from climate change will likely cause more events that uproot or break large numbers of trees in the Amazon rainforest. They found that the Amazon will likely experience 43% more large blowdown events (of 25,000 square meters or more) by the end of the century. This could dramatically affect carbon storage. |
Detecting dark matter: Physicists from the University of California, Irvine; University of Delaware; and University of Tokyo have proposed a new potential way to study dark matter. The idea involves placing atomic clocks on a spacecraft that would fly in a region between the sun and Mercury. It could potentially detect theorized ultralight dark matter particles that have very small masses. |
|
The Office of Science posted four new highlights between 1/10/23 and 1/23/23.
|
|
Cosmic magnetic fields: Plasma is matter that’s so hot that the electrons separate from the atoms. Most of the matter in our observable universe is made of plasma, such as stars. Under certain circumstances, magnetic fields can spontaneously emerge in plasma. While theorists had predicted this phenomenon more than 60 years ago, researchers at UCLA recently observed it in the laboratory for the first time. They used the Accelerator Test Facility Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory to conduct the research. It could help explain magnetic fields that appear throughout the cosmos. |
|
Washington Post: How climate change will make atmospheric rivers even worse
A series of storms has recently hit California, driven by atmospheric rivers (long plumes of water vapor). Alan Rhoades from DOE’s Berkeley Lab discusses how climate change will make these rivers occur more frequently and cause more damage.
|
|
Pandemic Tracking Software
|
|
The DOE Office of Science is learning from our experiences with COVID-19 to prepare for the future. Last June, we established the Bio-preparedness Research Virtual Environment to provide funding to projects that could provide early warnings for pandemics. One of the projects is a partnership between DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and Argonne National Laboratory to improve a tracking program for COVID-19 that a team at Sandia developed in 2020. They are in the process of making the model use less computational power, be better at predicting human-to-human transmission, and include a model that uses social science to predict human behavior. |
|
RENEW Initiative Supports Institutions Underrepresented in Science and Technology Ecosystem
|
|
The DOE Office of Science’s Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) initiative is focused on providing research opportunities to historically underrepresented groups and institutions in STEM.
New funding is going to support internships, mentorships, and training programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), other Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), and other research institutions. The programs will leverage our national laboratories, user facilities, and other research infrastructure to offer hands-on experiences. Through opening new career avenues for talented young scientists, engineers, and technicians, this program will diversify American leadership in the sciences.
In addition, the WDTS RENEW Pathway Summer Schools will provide opportunities to high schoolers, recent high school graduates, and early undergraduate students from underrepresented groups and underserved schools in STEM. DOE’s Ames National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and a collaborative effort at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/Brookhaven National Laboratory will be hosting students this summer.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
|