Feature Articles

Nonfood, plant-based biofuels have potential as a green alternative to fossil fuels, but the enzymes required for production are too inefficient and costly to produce. However, new research is shining a light on enzymes from fungi that could make biofuels economically viable.

More than three years ago, the Sandia National Laboratories-operated atmospheric measurement facility in Alaska switched from launching helium-filled weather balloons to launching weather balloons filled with hydrogen produced on-site. By switching the gas used in their weather balloons, they have reduced their metaphorical footprint on the fragile Arctic ecosystem. Since then, they have launched nearly 5,000 hydrogen balloons with minimal issues.

Storm-DEPART helps utilities refine their damage estimates by combining utility infrastructure data with weather data from the National Hurricane Center to efficiently deploy restoration resources.

Argonne fellow Ashley Bielinski developed a new approach to study atomic layer deposition, an important technique in research and industry.

Rouven Essig is a theoretical particle physicist at Stony Brook University. He conceives new experiments and detection methods in the search for knowledge about dark matter.

The start of this year’s physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000, a brand new detector, known as sPHENIX, will track what happens when the nuclei of gold atoms smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. RHIC’s STAR detector, which has been running and evolving since 2000, will also see some firsts in Run 23.

From a nanoscale grain of platinum, researchers made a first step in developing a tool that enables them to characterize the materials with a new level of detail, ultimately producing the best materials for the hydrogen production and use.

Argonne and Northeastern Illinois University launched instruments to measure Chicago’s changing climate. These sensors are the first for the Argonne-led Urban Integrated Field Laboratory called Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS).

Mike Brzustowicz and his team are using a mathematical principle and Sandia’s computing capabilities to probe the mysteries of connections between people and things, and create a predictive measure for everything from energy grid resiliency to A.I.