RICHLAND, Wash.—Scientists have developed a way to detect tiny amounts of hard-to-detect explosives more than eight feet away, reducing the need to swipe clothing, luggage or other materials. The method, published in the chemistry journal Talanta, detects …
The Science Viruses affect prevalent microbial systems by killing hosts, transferring genes laterally, and altering cellular metabolism, all of which affect carbon/nitrogen cycles in nature. A virus-infected cell, or “virocell,” is distinct from its …
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—An experiment aimed at learning more about how plants grow in space will be aboard a National Aeronautics and Space Administration launch in early August from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A Northrop Grumman Cygnus …
Imagine a future where America's energy infrastructure is resilient, reliable, and powered entirely by renewable sources. Integrated long-duration storage systems ensure a reliable supply of clean energy across the country, when and where it’s needed. …
The Science Earth system models are important tools for making climate predictions and projections. While climate projections have a strong dependence on future socioeconomic scenarios, initial conditions are critical for making skillful climate …
The Science Lateral water movement from ridges to valleys plays a key role in organizing water and energy at the watershed scale. But it has been long neglected in traditional land models. In response, scientists developed a water tracer tool in an …
RICHLAND, Wash.— A new database that makes thousands of the ideas, technologies, methods and software developed by the Department of Energy available in one place has been created by DOE, working closely with software engineers and others at Pacific …
Aerosol particles are tiny. Swirling suspended in the air around us, most are smaller than the smallest bug, thinner than the thinnest hair on your head, gossamer specks practically invisible to the naked eye. Newly formed ones are nano-sized. Yet their …
The Science Evapotranspiration (ET) is the movement of water from land to the atmosphere by evaporation and transpiration. Moisture recycling describes the contribution from local ET to local precipitation. It has been quantified using models that often …
The Science The Slab Ocean Model (SOM) is an approximation of a fully Dynamic Ocean Model (DOM). Unlike a DOM that can simulate changes in ocean circulation, transports, and full-depth temperature and salinity, the SOM is designed to capture temperature …
For those of us in the Tri-Cities, the sprinklers watering our lawns and nourishing our crops are primarily fed by surface water from the Columbia River. Much of the world, however, depends on groundwater from subsurface aquifers to irrigate crops and …
RICHLAND, Wash.—Every second of every day, utilities monitor the flow of power through the nation’s electric grid, monitoring whether power generated matches power demanded by homes, businesses, vehicles and more. For every disruption—a substation outage, …
From the foundations to the emerging frontiers of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are investigating ways to harness the power of AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Robert Rallo, director of PNNL …
The Science How bacteria eat food, and what kinds of products they can make from that food, is dictated by the metabolic network of enzyme patterns encoded in their genomes. Using computational methods to learn these patterns across a large number of known …
As we look to the sky above and ponder one of the biggest questions of our time—how to combat the carbon emissions that are driving climate change—a potential answer just may lie beneath our feet, in Earth’s deep subsurface. Pacific Northwest National …
RICHLAND, Wash.—The Pacific Northwest is set to begin work building out a clean hydrogen economy with today’s announcement of a Phase 1 funding award from the Department of Energy. The $27.5 million award to the Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Association ( …
Efficient heat pump water heaters (HPWHs) desire nothing more than a warm reception in America’s homes, but sometimes they end up on the outside looking in. It isn’t due to a lack of hospitality. Rather, there’s a need for more public awareness and …
The Science A complex interplay of energetics and dynamics governs the behavior of nanocrystals in solution. These dynamics are usually interpreted in terms of the theory developed by Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey, and Overbeek (DVLO), and understanding these …
RICHLAND, Wash.—Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have been awarded more than 3 million node hours on the nation’s most powerful computers to explore questions around pathogens, climate and energy-efficient …
The Science Ice nucleating particles (INPs) are a rare subset of particles that can have an outsized impact on weather and clouds by initiating the process of ice formation in clouds. Cloud ice plays an important role in the formation of precipitation as …
