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 [...]
Small team carries large load
Sandia National Laboratories computer scientist Ronald Minnich calls the desktop-extension supercomputing project a large effort with a small team. “To do it with only four other people is pretty unusual,” Minnich says. “I would assume a normal company would allocate at least 10 times as many people to the effort. A lot of things we’ve [...]
Laptop supercomputing
A small team led by Sandia National Laboratories is attempting to virtually put the world’s most powerful supercomputers on a user’s own desktop or laptop.
Pressure and flow
The first large-scale simulation of blood flow in coronary arteries enlists a realistic description of the vessels’ geometries. Researchers reported on the simulation today at the SC10 supercomputing conference in New Orleans.
Computational sciences gets a Harvard institute
Projects such as looking at blood flow in the coronary arteries highlight the value of computation to understand problems in a variety of disciplines, including engineering, medicine, biology, the physical sciences and business. Seeing the need to expand course offerings and graduate student research opportunities, Cherry Murray, dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and [...]
In climate modeling, speed matters
A Brookhaven team wants to build the ‘fast physics’ behind clouds, air-suspended particles and precipitation into global climate models.
The wings that fly FASTER
If FASTER can be considered a jet that speeds global climate modelers to analyze fast physics processes, its wings are the testbed and associated research. The testbed integrates two major “fast” components: a single column model (SCM), a roughly 100 kilometer by 100 km column that complements traditional global climate models; and a numerical weather [...]
Seeing the invisible
Armed with computing power from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers are detailing the nature of dark matter surrounding a galaxy much like our own Milky Way.
Dark matter predictions put to test
Collisions in dark matter “clumps” should produce gamma rays, but a satellite looking for them has come up empty so far.
Parsing particle experiments
A detector suggested dark matter collisions, but no other test has seen similar signs.
Winding path leads to fluid career
Paul Fischer’s fascination with science, mathematics and engineering have landed him in a position to work with the world’s most powerful computers.
Nuclear predictive
Argonne National Laboratory applies mathematics and computation to engineer the next generation of nuclear reactors.
From Cuba to Cambridge by way of Miami
The former Computational Science Graduate Fellowship recipient escaped the communist regime with his family, then found a love of physics.
Forceful thinking
A quantum curiosity called the Casimir force gums up micro- and nanomachines. Work at MIT led by a newly minted alumnus of the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship suggests uses for the force – and ways around it.
