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Boiling hot water bubbles up into pools of vibrant teal and blue. The steam rises, burning anyone who gets too close. The water is acidic – sometimes as acidic as stomach acid. Yet you’re fine, having evolved to live in such extreme circumstances. This is the life of a microbe in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.
To understand the communities these strange lifeforms create, researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory catalogued microbes living in hot springs in Yellowstone, Iceland, and Japan.
Learn more about how this study expanded our understanding of these bizarre organisms.
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Asteroid Bennu: Scientists at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are playing a major role in analyzing a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid. Samples were collected by NASA from the asteroid Bennu; Berkeley Lab is one of 40 organizations examining the asteroid’s chemical makeup. The team has found evidence that Bennu comes from an ancient wet world and also has some material from the coldest, most distant areas of the solar system. The research used the Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry, both DOE Office of Science user facilities. |
High-temperature superconductors: Superconductivity – the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity with no resistance – could transform how we transmit power. However, current superconductors aren’t in widespread use because they require extremely low temperatures. High-temperature superconductors work at slightly warmer temperatures, but many require very high pressures to function. A team including researchers from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory demonstrated a material that acts as a high-temperature superconductor at room pressure. |
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Spin waves: As electronics grow smaller, researchers need to find new ways of creating microelectronics. One promising avenue is “spintronics,” which uses an electron’s charge and spin to store information. Magnonics is a subset of spintronics that uses the collective behavior of spins, known as spin waves. Researchers at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a way to take images of spin waves in real time. Their new method allows them to directly observe the behavior with high resolution. The technique could also be very helpful for research in neuromorphic computing, where computers have brain-like structures. |
Turbulence: Turbulence – the chaotic movement of fluids, including air and liquids – shows up in many natural phenomena. It affects everything from plane flight to molecular movement. But modeling turbulence is so complex that even the most powerful conventional computers in the world cannot solve some problems. Currently, there is no way to simulate fluid dynamics with both precision and computational efficiency. A team led by researchers from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has devised a mathematical way to use quantum computers to simulate fluid dynamics, including turbulence. |
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Solid-state batteries: Solid state batteries could store more energy and be safer than current batteries, but the electrolytes inside of them are more difficult to create. A team led by a Duke University researcher used DOE user facilities to investigate how to improve these batteries. Using the Spallation Neutron Source and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the team found that lithium ions diffuse easily in a new material for solid-state batteries. |
Spinning gluons: One of the long-standing questions in nuclear physics is where the proton gets its spin. While it most likely comes from the proton’s components – quarks and gluons – the contributions of each aren’t clear. Part of the answer lies in the spin of gluons themselves. Members of the Jefferson Lab Angular Momentum collaboration combined theoretical analysis with observational data from the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (both DOE Office of Science user facilities). The team found that it is extremely likely that the gluon’s spin is positive. |
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Fusion exhaust gases: For a fusion device to produce power, the plasma at its center must reach temperatures hotter than the core of the sun. But to avoid damage to the device, the temperature at the edge of the plasma must be substantially cooler. Researchers from Commonwealth Fusion Systems and DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory found that using louvers at the bottom of a fusion device (like those used in a building’s air ducts) can reduce the temperature on the edge of a plasma. This is a major step forward towards developing a fusion device that can produce more energy than required to run it. |
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Cutting Cancer Pathology Reporting Time
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Cancer registries help doctors and researchers see trends in cancer rates nationally and regionally. In the past, updating these registries required people to sort through and analyze stacks of pathology reports. This process took 22 months on average, meaning that researchers couldn’t identify trends for nearly two years after they occurred.
A team including researchers at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has substantially cut down on this processing time. Using artificial intelligence developed by ORNL researchers, they cut the time down to 14 months. The work is part of the Modeling Outcomes Using Surveillance Data and Scalable Artificial Intelligence for Cancer program (MOSSAIC), a partnership between ORNL and the National Cancer Institute.
While this is a major milestone, the team continues to work on the challenge, with the goal of lowering the time down to a mere two months.
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Mining the Dark Sky with Exascale Computing
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Dark matter and dark energy have driven the evolution of our universe. Dark matter accounts for 27 percent of our universe and dark energy for 68 percent, with ordinary matter making up only 5 percent. Despite their importance, we still know very little about what they are.
Astrophysicists are using observations from telescopes and powerful computer simulations to dig into these mysterious phenomena. In a project called Dark Sky Mining, researchers at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory are creating detailed maps of the sky based on both of these resources.
This project is using the new Aurora exascale computer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility. With its capacity to execute more than a billion billion calculations per second, Aurora can rapidly simulate and adjust numerous cosmic scenarios. In addition to computational power, it also uses advanced artificial intelligence and statistical methods. By the end, the group aims to more clearly describe how dark matter and dark energy function and influence the distribution and characteristics of galaxies.
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Research News Update provides a review of recent Office of Science Communications and Public Affairs stories and features.
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