Energy's Argonne National Laboratory
ARGONNE, IL (Sept. 3, 2009) -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have developed a systematic method to improve the stability of antibodies. The technique could lead to better biosensors, disease therapeutics and diagnostic reagents and non-laboratory applications, including environmental remediation.
ARGONNE, Ill. (Aug. 19, 2009) -- Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago's Brain Tumor Center have developed a way to target brain cancer cells using inorganic titanium dioxide nanoparticles bonded to soft biological material.
ARGONNE, Ill. (July 16, 2009) -- U.S. Department of Energy laboratories fight off millions of cyber attacks every year, but a near real-time dialog between these labs about this hostile activity has never existed -- until now.
ARGONNE, Ill. (June 18, 2009) -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have reached a milestone in the study of emergent magnetism.
A novel system is enabling high energy physicists at CERN in Switzerland, to make production runs that integrate their existing pool of distributed computers with dynamic resources in "science clouds." The work was presented at the 17th annual conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, held in Prague, Czech Republic, March 21-27.
ARGONNE, Ill. (March 13, 2009) -- The process to turn propane into industrially necessary propylene has been expensive and environmentally unfriendly. That was until scientists at U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory devised a greener way to take this important step in chemical catalysis.
When squeezed, electrons increase their ability to move around. In compounds such as semiconductors and electrical insulators, such squeezing can dramatically change the electrical- and magnetic- properties.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have found a new way to study individual living bacteria cells and analyze their chemistry. In research published today in Science, the scientists used high-energy X-ray fluorescence measurements for mapping and chemical analyses of single free-floating, or planktonic, and surface-adhered, or biofilm, cells of Pseudomonas fluorescens. The results showed differences between the planktonic and adhered cells in morphology, elemental composition and sensitivity to hexavalent chromium, a heavy-metal contaminant and a known carcinogen. The biofilm cells were more tolerant of the contaminant, while it damaged or killed the planktonic cells.
Diamonds are the hardest known substance. Carbon nanotubes are the strongest. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory tried to combine the best of both worlds by creating a composite nanostructure. They wanted to grow tiny carbon tubes with tiny diamonds. But the results were not as expected. Instead, the experiment altered the surface area of the nanotubes, creating wing-like extensions. Even though the result wasn't what the experimenters were looking for, these modified surfaces may push nanotubes further into the world of practical and applied materials and systems. It also provides insight into how to synthesize an emerging class of material called ''nanocarbons,'' which consist of different allotropes -- the same elements with different molecular structures -- of carbon combined at the nanoscale to yield new materials with unique properties.
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and Northern Illinois University have shown that very thin materials can still retain an electric polarization, opening the potential for a wide range of tiny devices. The researchers found that the ferroelectric phase ? the ability to hold a switchable electric polarization ? is stable for thicknesses as small as 1.2 nanometers, one-billionth of a meter, or a size several hundred thousand times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
In the first use ever of a new three-dimensional technique to study diesel engine emissions, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory developed information that could lead to improved exhaust-cleaning devices, ways for industry to meet environmental regulations, and new insights on the impact to public health from diesel engine emissions.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have reached for the stars ? and seen what's inside. Argonne scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Chicago, Washington University and the Universita di Torino in Italy, examined stardust from a meteorite and found remnants of now-extinct technetium atoms made in stars long ago. The stardust grains are tiny bits of stars that lived and died before the solar system formed. Each grain is many times smaller than the width of a human hair, and carries a chemical record of nuclear reactions in its parent star.
The particularly powerful ? and very scarce ? flexible forms of stem cells needed for medical research and treatment may now be both plentiful and simple to produce, with a new technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory ? and the source is as close as your own bloodstream. These flexible stem cells, able to morph into a variety of cell types, are called "pluripotent," and before this Argonne research, they have been found only in fetal tissue, which is limited, and in bone marrow, which is difficult to collect. Pluripotent stem cells are important because they can generate all types of tissues found in the body, and the Argonne-developed technology can produce them from adult blood cells.
