Search  

Profile

Lenore Rasmussen PPPL Partnering with Lenore Rasmussen

Lenore Rasmussen was a laboratory technician in Virginia in 1986 when she had a Dr. Frankenstein moment. She was shooting electrical current through a slab of polymer gel when, suddenly, the blob seemed to come alive. Hit with 50 volts of current, the gel convulsed, shrinking to a fifth of its size. When she stopped the current, the gel returned to normal. It hadn’t done that before.

Full Story

Feature

The MOOSE simulation platform lets researchers "plug-and-play" by entering the mathematical model describing their system and letting MOOSE execute the simulation.INL's MOOSE drives nuclear materials, design innovation

In nature, moose tend to be loners. But the one at DOE's Idaho National Laboratory is working with a bison, marmot, rat and others to make computer simulation more accessible and to foster new collaboration opportunities. The beast achieving all this is the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment, or MOOSE. This computer simulation framework advances the process for predicting the behavior of complex systems ranging from irradiation effects on materials to groundwater physics and chemistry.

Full Story

See also…

DOE Pulse
  • Number 349  |
  • October 31, 2011

  • A Berkeley Lab biofuel that may be better than diesel

    Bisabolane is an organic compound that has all the properties of D2 diesel fuel and then some: it has a much lower freezing point and is less likely to clog machinery at low temperatures. Now, by altering E. coli bacteria and Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast, scientists in the Physical Sciences Division (PBD) of DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their colleagues in DOE’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have forged a path to replacing petroleum-derived diesel with a renewable biofuel, by coaxing these microbes to overproduce bisabolene, the precursor of bisabolane.

    Full Story

  • Nationwide utility rates now on Open EI

    NREL researchers Debbie Brodt-Giles and Graham Hill examine some of the web pages available to the public through OpenEI.org, a new site where consumers, scientists, and utility representatives can get information on energy. Credit: Dennis Schroeder

    Utility rates from cities all across the United States are now available in one place —the Open Energy Information platform, or OpenEI.org, developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.


    Am I paying too much for electricity? Does it make sense for me to put solar panels on my roof? Should I lease my land to wind-farm developers?

    Consumers and businesses are asking, and OpenEI provides the answers. OpenEI is where energy officials and consumers alike can go to boost their energy IQs and make better decisions.

    Full Story

  • Python snakes into Global Arrays Toolkit

    Researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory expanded the Global Arrays Toolkit by integrating in the programming language Python, making it easier for programmers to write codes and incorporate features. While many of us fear large reptiles, materials scientists and other researchers embrace Python—the easy-to-use programming language, not the snake. At DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, computer programmers have included full support for Python in the Global Arrays Toolkit. The toolkit makes programming on distributed memory computers as easy as using shared memory on a desktop and scales to today’s top supercomputers. This allows for the simulation of larger, complex systems such as in computational chemistry, materials science, and computational fluid dynamics which impact national energy use.

    Full Story

  • New technologies bolster function of prosthetic limbs

    Schematic of the drug loading and release process of the carbon nanotube (CNT) nanoreservoirs. A) Drug solution is filled into the interior of acid treated CNTs through sonication; B) Pyrrole is added to the suspension containing CNTs and Dex and electropolymerization is carried out; C) Drug is released from CNT nanoreservoirs to surroundings through diffusion or electric stimulation. A team of scientists from DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory and the University of Pittsburgh’s Bioengineering Department are using new forms of nanotechnology to improve neural-controlled prosthetic implants. These technologies are of particular interest to the U.S. military for treating soldiers and veterans who have suffered loss of a limb during service.


    Neural-controlled prosthetics allow recipients to manipulate their artificial limbs by means of microelectrode implants placed in the brain or in other neural tissue.

    Full Story