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Scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that DNA “linker” strands coax nano-sized rods to line up in way unlike any other spontaneous arrangement of rod-shaped objects. The arrangement—with the rods forming “rungs” on ladder-like ribbons linked by multiple DNA strands—results from the collective interactions of the flexible DNA tethers and may be unique to the nanoscale. The research could result in the fabrication of new nanostructured materials with desired properties.
“This is a completely new mechanism of self-assembly that does not have direct analogs in the realm of molecular or microscale systems,” said Brookhaven physicist Oleg Gang, lead author on a paper describing the research in ACS Nano.
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Researchers at DOE’s Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University, and the University of Crete in Greece have found a new way to switch magnetism that is at least 1000 times faster than currently used in magnetic memory technologies. Magnetic switching is used to encode information in hard drives, magnetic random access memory and other computing devices. The discovery potentially opens the door to terahertz and faster memory speeds.
Ames Laboratory physicist Jigang Wang and his team used short laser pulses to create ultra-fast changes in the magnetic structure, within quadrillionths of a second (femtosecond), from anti-ferromagnetic to ferromagnetic ordering in colossal magnetoresistive materials, which are promising for use in next-generation memory and logic devices.
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NA catalyst that quickly produces chemical fuel from wind energy but uses more energy than it stores won't get the job; however, scientists didn't have a way to measure the energy wasted in certain liquids, until DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory devised a quick, elegant technique. This method, by Dr. John Roberts and Dr. R. Morris Bullock, was published in Inorganic Chemistry.
"We could make some educated guesses and do back-of-the-envelope calculations as to over potential in organic solvents, but it wasn't good enough," said Bullock, Director of the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by DOE's Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
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A routine experimental check has revealed that energetic electrons may interact more profusely with nuclei that contain more protons than those with fewer. Though not completely unexpected, the researchers were surprised to find evidence of the effect in this experimental check. The result comes from explorations of the lead nucleus conducted at DOE's Jefferson Lab, and it could provide insight into heavy matter.
The scientists got the result from experiments that consisted of banging spinning electrons into various nuclei and observing the aftermath.
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Today, instant access to information is taken for granted. The national labs are no exception; local data users expect immediate access to their data. DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) made its twelve million environmental data records accessible to scientists, remediation teams and the public at a mouse click.
LANL successfully integrated all of the environmental data into a single, cloud-based, web-accessible system combining transparency to the public with the immediate access required by technical staff at www.intellusnmdata.com.
The newly integrated data span a wide range of media including air, soil, sediment, biota, and water; various analytes, time periods and varying formats that were formerly contained in scattered databases. The unconsolidated information made comprehensive work with the data impossible.
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