MIT’s Dragos Velicanu is helping sort through data from the Large Hadron Collider for clues to the mysteries surrounding the strong force and the early universe.
Seeking new angles
Dragos Velicanu likes to look at just about everything from a fresh perspective. “Outside work, I like to travel, go camping, hiking, skiing – basically see the world from all elevations, seasons and angles,” says the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship recipient at MIT. What’s more, he’s fortunate that his advisor is Gunther [...]
Sun on Earth
Simulations at Sandia National Laboratories reveal that using magnetism to heat and insulate fusion fuel could recreate solar conditions in the lab.
Putting Big Squeeze Fusion to the Test
A new Sandia National Laboratories-based approach to fusion that’s shown promise in computational simulations has passed its first bricks-and-mortar experimental test. MagLIF (Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion) envisions using Sandia’s Z machine as a massive magnetic vise to implode, and thus heat, a tiny cylinder full of deuterium to Sun-like temperatures, igniting a fusion reaction. “I [...]
Filling in the blanks
To prevent important information from being missed, a Berkeley Lab team is improving how supercomputers divvy up the ponderous tasks surrounding large simulations’ analytics and visualization.
Going deep
The discovery of that our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate garnered a 2011 Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but the finding also opened up a plethora of new questions about what is happening in the far reaches of deep space. There, researchers glimpse [...]
Overcoming resistance
To find a path around antibiotic resistance, a team working with the Intrepid supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory is simulating molecular binding interactions to rapidly vet new infection-fighting candidates.
A timely death
Speed kills, as the slogan says, and in computers what it kills could be disease. Argonne National Laboratory researcher Andrew Binkowski’s calculations of protein structure help find ligands – smaller molecules – that attach to them, to deliver drugs that stop dangerous infections. But without supercomputers it could take months to model a single ligand, [...]
A spontaneous collaboration
In 2007, when Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers calculated that adding boron would bend carbon nanotubes, they did little with the information. Boron was one of several elements the computational scientists plugged into their model as they investigated ways to induce useful changes in nanotube structures. There were experiments to compare with the results [...]
Kinky nanotubes
With the help of Oak Ridge computations, scientists are probing the properties of macroscale sponges made of nanoscale carbon-boron tubes. The material could soak up oil spills, help store energy or meet other needs.
A passion for pressure
Plasmas are the purview of Livermore scientist and Computational Science Graduate Fellowship alumnus Jeffrey Hittinger. He works both sides of the fusion street – inertial confinement and magnetic confinement – while simulating aspects of these tremendously hot, fast-moving particle clouds.
Twice-stuffed permafrost
A Pacific Northwest National Laboratory computation suggests that the water-gas compounds found in ocean permafrost can provide energy and store it, too – and then trap carbon dioxide.
Enlightening predictions
Computer simulations of hurricane lightning could be the key to predicting and avoiding the storms’ real-world punch.
Prime-time punch
The mantis shrimp packs one of the strongest punches on Earth. Computational Science Graduate Fellow Michael Rosario is investigating the physics, design and material properties behind the crustacean’s prey-crunching wallop. His research has landed him on the National Geographic Wild channel.
Inside the skull
Modeling the elements of blood flow in the brain could help neurosurgeons to predict when and where an aneurysm might rupture – and when to operate.
Power boost
Berkeley scientists have combined computational modeling and advanced materials synthesis to devise a low-cost anode that bolsters the feasibility of long-life lithium-ion batteries.
Seeing beyond 3-D
High-dimensional visualization techniques at Stony Brook and Brookhaven are helping reveal the interactions that drive climate and other complexities.
Mining for aerosols and other particles
Klaus Mueller’s latest n-dimensional visualization work capitalizes on a decade-long collaboration with Department of Energy atmospheric chemist Alla Zelenyuk, work aimed at seeing the proverbial forest amidst trees of data. At DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Zelenyuk specializes in using single-particle mass spectrometry to analyze the real-time transformations of nanoparticles. This includes atmospheric particles, such [...]
Helping hydrogen along
Researchers have pursued clean hydrogen-based fuels for years. A Berkeley Lab team hopes to spur that quest with help from one of the world’s most powerful computers.
Designer yeast
A Johns Hopkins University team has built a yeast chromosome from scratch, they report today in the journal Nature. Sarah Richardson used what she learned as a Computational Science Graduate Fellow to help design and monitor the chromosome’s construction.
Boosting Berkeley Lab’s bacteria research
For one summer, Sarah Richardson postponed her work computerizing yeast genome research and probed bacteria instead. As part of her Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, Richardson served a 2009 practicum under Adam Arkin, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physical Biosciences Division. She made important contributions to Arkin’s research into an RNA-based transcription [...]
A long view of Gulf oil spill
While others predicted when oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico might reach beaches, ocean modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research asked when gushing oil might exit the Gulf, where it would go and how diluted it’d be, up to a year later.
Tracing CFCs and greenhouse gases
National Center for Atmospheric Research oceanographer Synte Peacock studies “the distribution of various tracers – something that tags a water mass and is carried around by ocean currents – to learn more about ocean circulation in the past and present.” These tracers include carbon and radiocarbon isotopes, paleotracers (fossils from the sea, in sediments and [...]
Pounding out atomic nuclei
Thousands of tiny systems called atomic nuclei – specific combinations of protons and neutrons – prove extremely difficult to study but have big implications for nuclear stockpile stewardship. To describe all of the nuclei and the reactions between them, a nationwide collaboration is devising powerful algorithms that run on high-performance computers.
Cranking up the speed of DFT
Density functional theory (DFT) can be used to determine densities of protons and neutrons making up a nucleus. “If we can determine those densities precisely,” says Witold Nazarewicz, professor of physics at the University of Tennessee, “we can determine the binding energy – the energy stored in the nucleus.” The energy density functional (EDF) in [...]
