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Environmental Sciences

LATEST ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES NEWS

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 1-Aug-2025 23:11 ET (2-Aug-2025 03:11 GMT/UTC)

Improved catalyst turns harmful greenhouse gases into cleaner fuels, chemical feedstocks

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A chemical reaction can convert two polluting greenhouse gases into valuable building blocks for cleaner fuels and feedstocks, but the high temperature required for the reaction also deactivates the catalyst. A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a way to thwart deactivation. The strategy may apply broadly to other catalysts.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science

Gordon Bell Climate Prize goes to Kaust Frontier Users’ Exascale Climate Emulator

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

A team of researchers led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, Saudi Arabia, are this year’s winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. The team developed an exascale climate emulator with radically enhanced resolution but without the computational expense and data storage requirements of state-of-the-art climate models.

Game-changing quantum chemistry calculations on frontier earn Gordon Bell Prize

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

Researchers led by the University of Melbourne, Australia, are winners of the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2024 Gordon Bell Prize in supercomputing for conducting a quantum molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind. Using Frontier, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the team calculated a system containing more than 2 million correlated electrons.

Funder: Advanced Scientific Computing Research

Thermochemical tech shows promising path for building heat

DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Energy stored in thermochemical materials can effectively heat indoor spaces, particularly in humid regions, according to researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Journal: Applied Energy

New program aims to BRIDGE gap in solar

DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
Business Announcement

Sandia National Laboratrories is collaborating with Red Cloud Renewable to train Native American women in photovoltaic panel installation. Native American women are significantly underrepresented in the solar installation field, making up just 0.05% of the industry, according to Red Cloud Renewable.

How microbes create the most toxic form of mercury

DOE/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

SLAC’s SSRL helps pin down key players in the microbial production of methylmercury, a poison that can accumulate in fish.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOE’s Quantum Computing User Program releases request for information to father input on quantum computing access

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Business Announcement

The Department of Energy's Quantum Computing User Program at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility is releasing a Request for Information to understand the latest in quantum computing hardware, software tools and user engagement.

How ‘clean’ does a quantum computing test facility need to be? PNNL scientists show the way

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

How to keep stray radiation from “shorting” superconducting qubits; a pair of studies shows where ionizing radiation is lurking and how to banish it.

Journal: PRX Quantum
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Argonne team breaks new ground in AI-driven protein design

DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
Grant and Award Announcement

An Argonne-led team developed an AI-driven multimodal framework that incorporates experimental data and text-based narratives to accelerate the design of new proteins. A finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize, the effort used five top supercomputers, including Argonne’s Aurora exascale system.

Ensuring a bright future for diamond electronics and sensors

DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

To expand the potential use of diamond in semiconductor and quantum technologies, researchers are developing improved processes for growing the material at lower temperatures that won’t damage the silicon in computer chips. These advances include insights into creating protective hydrogen layers on quantum diamonds without damaging crucial properties like nitrogen-vacancy centers.

Journal: Diamond and Related Materials
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, U.S. National Science Foundation, DOE/US Department of Energy, Australian Research Council

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