NEWS RELEASES

DOE Funded News

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 10-Jul-2025 17:11 ET (10-Jul-2025 21:11 GMT/UTC)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Journal: Cement and Concrete Research
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation

Mini flow battery speeds energy storage research

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Mini flow cell battery provides the first step toward an AI-driven, robotic energy storage discovery laboratory.

Journal: Journal of The Electrochemical Society
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Mini flow battery speeds energy storage research

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Mini flow cell battery provides the first step toward an AI-driven, robotic energy storage discovery laboratory.

Journal: Journal of The Electrochemical Society
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Homing in on spinning gluons: New study nearly nixes the negative

DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

Researchers have been working for decades to understand the details of where the proton gets its intrinsic angular momentum, otherwise referred to as its spin. Recently, there have been indications that the spin contribution of the gluons could either be positive or negative. Now, a new approach that avoids assumptions and re-analyzes observational data with lattice quantum chromodynamics points strongly toward a positive gluon spin contribution, ∆g, to the proton spin.

Journal: Physical Review Letters
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

‘Smaller and better’: Rice research uncovers performance sweet spot for relaxor nanomaterial

Rice University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study led by Rice materials scientist Lane Martin sheds light on how the extreme miniaturization of thin films affects the behavior of relaxor ferroelectrics — materials with noteworthy energy-conversion properties used in sensors, actuators and nanoelectronics.

Journal: Nature Nanotechnology
Funder: Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Army Research Laboratory, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DOE/US Department of Energy

Innovative target design leads to surprising discovery in laser-plasma acceleration

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

SLAC researchers studying laser-driven proton acceleration introduced a self-replenishing water sheet target to address the inefficiency of replacing targets after each laser pulse. The new target had an unanticipated side effect, resulting in a naturally focused, more tightly aligned proton beam.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation

Revolutionizing materials discovery: Lehigh University researchers leverage AI to accelerate breakthroughs in science and industry

Lehigh University
Grant and Award Announcement

Lehigh University researchers are pioneering AI-driven advancements in materials science with an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. Led by Dr. Chinedu Ekuma, the project focuses on developing interpretable machine learning models to predict material properties more efficiently. Key innovations include physics-guided machine learning, scalable AI for material predictions, integration with diffusion models, and an open-source computing platform for global accessibility. This research aims to accelerate breakthroughs in semiconductors, aerospace materials, battery technology, climate modeling, and healthcare.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Correlated nucleon pairs predict quark-gluon distributions

DOE/Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

Physicists know from previous experiments that what happens at the nuclear scale to protons and neutrons also affects their constituent quarks and gluons. A novel new framework has tapped on short-range correlations – brief pairings of protons and neutrons - to decipher the particles’ choreography and reveal this connection.

Journal: Physical Review Letters
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

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