If you’ve ever tended a garden or potted a plant, you know a few simple truths about green things—they require water and nutrients to survive and their roots are good indicators of their overall health. So we water on a regular schedule, provide for root growth and add nutrient-rich soils to ensure a balanced diet.…

Intel Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will deliver the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP in the United States. The system being developed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago—named ​“Aurora”—will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery. The contract is valued at more than $500 million and will be delivered to…

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with DOE’s Ames Laboratory, have reported an important and unexpected reaction mechanism — called “redox behavior” — on the surface of catalyst support materials that have application in the chemical industry. Most industrial catalysts are anchored to metal oxide supports such as…

By exploiting the properties of neutrons to probe electrons in a metal, a team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has gained new insight into the behavior of correlated electron systems, which are materials that have useful properties such as magnetism or superconductivity. The research, to be published…

Solar and renewable energy is getting hot, thanks to nanoscientists — those who work with materials smaller than the width of a human hair — at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory who have discovered new, better and faster ways to convert energy from light into energetic electrons. Their innovative methods could…

Scientists hoping to develop new energy resources have long pursued the goal of directly converting methane, a simple and abundant chemical found in natural gas, into a usable fuel such as methanol. Until now, scientists have required expensive-to-generate high temperatures to do this. In a new study, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE)…

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to provide system software expertise and a development ecosystem for a future high-performance computing (HPC) system based on 64-bit ARM processors. ARM is a RISC-based processor architecture that has dominated the mobile computing space for years. That dominance is…

Walk around any city neighborhood and chances are it looks nothing like it did 20 years ago. Thanks to growing urbanization, cities globally are rapidly expanding and accounting for more of our world’s population, gross domestic product and greenhouse gases. Adapting a city to keep up with evolving needs is one of the greatest daily…

For years, scientists have been creating and tweaking extremely tiny materials atom by atom in special clean rooms scrubbed of debris. Students needed a Ph.D. to join the club and study those tiny materials in a field known as nanoscience. Today, high school students can dabble in nanoscience thanks to the U.S. Department of Energy’s…

A cancer diagnosis is overwhelming, the treatment often complex and uncertain. Doctors have yet to understand how a specific cancer will affect an individual, and a drug that may hold promise for one patient, may not work for another. But a melding of medical research and high-performance computing is taking a more personalized approach to…

In order to understand various environmental processes and learn to better address the effects of pollution, scientists have been interested in tracking the movement of elements through the environment, particularly at interfaces between water and minerals. In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with the University…

The University of Chicago is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to launch an intellectual hub for advancing academic, industrial and governmental efforts in the science and engineering of quantum information. This hub within the Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME), called the Chicago Quantum Exchange, will…

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has identified a nickel oxide compound as an unconventional but promising candidate material for high-temperature superconductivity. The team successfully synthesized single crystals of a metallic trilayer nickelate compound, a feat the researchers believe to be a first. This nickel oxide compound…

Before Ebola virus ever struck West Africa, locals were already on the lookout for a deadly pathogen: Lassa virus. With thousands dying from Lassa every year – and the potential for the virus to cause even larger outbreaks – researchers are committed to designing a vaccine to stop it. Like Ebola virus, Lassa fever starts…

Rust usually indicates neglect; it undermines the structures and tools we rely on every day, from cars to bridges and buildings. But if carefully controlled, the same process that creates rust – metal oxidation – could offer scientists ways to advance state-of-the-art battery or drug delivery technologies. To achieve such control, scientists must first understand…

In a new study published last week in Science Advances, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory created tiny swirling vortices out of magnetic particles, providing insight into the behavior that governs such systems—which opens up new opportunities for materials and devices with new properties. Argonne physicist Alexey Snezhko and his colleagues…

The next generation of supercomputers will help researchers tackle increasingly complex problems through modeling large-scale systems, such as nuclear reactors or global climate, and simulating complex phenomena, such as the chemistry of molecular interactions. In order to be successful, these systems must be able to carry out vast numbers of calculations at extreme speeds, reliably…

Research published Wednesday in Nature Scientific Reports lays out a theoretical map to use ferroelectric material to process information using multivalued logic – a leap beyond the simple ones and zeroes that make up our current computing systems that could let us process information much more efficiently. The language of computers is written in just two symbols…

If you want to figure out how to get the most out of a brand new supercomputer, try crowdsourcing. That’s the idea behind the Intel® Xeon Phi™ User’s Group (IXPUG), the user group for the new Intel Xeon Phi “manycore” processor that is the heart of the new Theta machine recently installed at the U.S.…