Number 199

Sorting out proteins

Brookhaven researchers John Shanklin (L) and Sean McCorkle

With more and more protein sequence data available, scientists are increasingly looking for ways to extract the small subset of information that determines a protein's function. In addition to sorting out what makes related proteins differ, such information can help scientists engineer proteins to do new jobs. Now scientists at DOE's Brookhaven Lab have written a computer program to sort the informational "wheat" from the "chaff." The program identifies positions where two related groups of proteins differ in amino acid identity or in a property such as charge or polarity - positions likely to be biologically important for defining the proteins' specific functions.

[Karen McNulty Walsh, 631/344-8350,
kmcnulty@bnl.gov]

Pushing the limits of high-temperature sensors inside nuclear reactors

Cross-section (top) of a proposed thermocouple that passed a heating test (200X), and an alternate design, that didn't (100X).

As engineers worldwide develop materials for the next generation of nuclear reactors, DOE's Idaho National Laboratory is preparing to test these components under normal and accident conditions. Tracking high temperatures in a test reactor has always been difficult. Existing sensors, called thermocouples, lose their accuracy either from high temperatures or from radiation that causes sensor components to transform into other elements. Selecting different materials for wires, insulators and sheaths, INL's High Temperature Test Laboratory developed a thermocouple that can withstand temperatures 500 degrees Celsius higher than existing sensors. Preliminary test results were presented in November at the American Nuclear Society's winter meeting.

[Hannah Hickey, 208/526-4595,
hannah.hickey@inl.gov]

Argonne research helps improve permanent magnets

Permanent magnets are important in a variety of commercial technologies, from car starters to computer hard drives. Researchers at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory have found clues to making those magnets longer-lasting and more powerful. Using the Advanced Photon Source X-rays, the researchers were able to see details of rare-earth ions, a critical component of permanent magnets. Probing their magnetism with unprecedented resolution revealed that the presence of rare-earth ions in more than one atomic environment reduces the magnetic stability of the best-performing permanent magnets to date. This knowledge will enable manufacturers to manipulate the rare-earth ion atomic structure for optimization of future magnets.

[Catherine Foster, 630/252-5580, cfoster@anl.gov]

Double jeopardy: CDF searches for doubly-charged Higgs bosons

Joshua Tuttle (left), Christopher Hays (middle) and Ashutosh Kotwal (right) from Duke University worked on the analysis seeking doubly-charged Higgs bosons.

The CDF experiment at DOE's Fermilab is searching for a long-lived, doubly-charged Higgs boson, which deposits four times the "ionization energy" of the typical singly-charged particle. Ionization energy occurs when a charged particle traverses a gas, stripping electrons from atoms and turning them into ions. While no candidate events have yet been found, CDF has set the best limits in the world on the pair-production of long-lived doubly-charged Higgs bosons: 133 GeV and 109 GeV, respectively, on the masses of long-lived doubly-charged Higgs bosons with left-handed (HL) and right-handed (HR) interactions. If HL and HR have the same mass, CDF's lower mass limit increases to 146 GeV. The search continues.

[Siri Steiner, 630/840-6733,
siri@fnal.gov]

IPCC database aids climate researchers

For the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, model output was processed by the individual modeling groups and sent to a central data repository at Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The scientific payoff for this effort is that more than 300 users are analyzing model output from 21 different models, and more than 100 (possibly 200) manuscripts have been already written, based, at least in part, on the IPCC database. The database will likely attract continued scientific interest for several years.

[Anne M. Stark, 925/422-9799,
stark8@llnl.gov]

Joe Wong took a long road to Livermore

Joe Wong

When Joe Wong looks back on his life, he's convinced his children don't know much about the first 27 years of his life.

That was life before he was married, had three children, two grandchildren and long before he started working in the Chemistry and Materials Science Directorate at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Born in Hong Kong, Wong traveled a round-about way to get to Livermore in 1986. At 17, he left Hong Kong to attend high school in Australia. He spent the next 7 years or so there, earning two bachelors degrees in physical chemistry and pure and applied chemistry from the University of Tasmania.

He went on to work at Electrolytic Zinc of Australia for a year and worked nights as a lecturer in physical chemistry at Royal Hobart College, both in Tasmania. He came to the United States and attended Purdue University to earn his Ph.D. in physical chemistry. While at Purdue, he was recruited by GE Research and Development Center to serve as a staff research chemist in its solid state physics laboratory.

But one-third of the way through his career, Wong decided to change his specialty; he was fascinated by the world of synchrotron radiation. He helped build the first X-ray beam line at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the same time, Livermore was working with Stanford to construct three beam lines for Lab programs. He soon had a job offer from Lawrence Livermore.

Wong's Livermore career has been very successful. He not only has extensive research and development experience in a range of industrial and basic materials science, but his work in synchrotron radiation has earned him much prestige from collaborators and colleagues, domestic and abroad.

In 2003, Wong's team made a landmark event in the history of the experimental investigation of plutonium by mapping the full phonon dispersions of plutonium using an innovative microbeam-on-single-grain technique, ending the quest of this fundamental data for the past four decades or so.

Wong has come a long way from his studies in Tasmania. And by the time his stint at Livermore is over (he retires Jan. 4), he will have published more than 200 papers, earned seven patents, and garnered more than 12 awards from two R&D 100 Awards to the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists. Most recently, Wong was awarded a 2005 fellow of the American Physical Society.

As for life after retirement, Wong plans to enjoy life, smell the roses in his own garden and elsewhere around the globe, fulfill a scroll of items on his and his wife's dream list, but above all, devote as much time as possible to the grandchildren whose photos are plastered all over his office.

Submitted by DOE's Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory

DOE Pulse highlights work being done at the Department of Energy's national laboratories. DOE's laboratories house world-class facilities where more than 30,000 scientists and engineers perform cutting-edge research spanning DOE's science, energy, national security and environmental quality missions. DOE Pulse is distributed every two weeks. For more information, please contact Jeff Sherwood (jeff.sherwood
@hq.doe.gov, 202-586-5806)