Tag: DOE Science News Source

Setting a New Course for All About Energy, a Data-Driven Program for Chicago High School Students

Newswise — Argonne National Laboratory updates All About Energy program to focus on data-driven research into environmental justice issues in local Chicago communities.

Pollution, food accessibility, transportation and lead exposure are just some of the sustainability concerns found throughout various Chicago communities.

Students from those communities participated in a data-focused program examining those issues as they prepared for careers as future leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

In the annual All About Energy (AAE) program, students embark on a six-week apprenticeship that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory hosts in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Office of Civic Engagement and After School Matters.

“To address sustainability issues, you need to consider not only environmental concerns, but also social and economic factors. The new curriculum for AAE prepares students to strengthen their data analysis skills in order to draw conclusions and develop evidence-based arguments. Furthermore, it empowers them to advocate for communities as STEM leaders, no matter what pathway they choose for their studies and careers.” — Jacqueline Otmanski, Learning Center instructor

This year marked a new beginning for AAE in more ways than one. Not only did AAE feature in-person activities for the first time since the start of the pandemic in 2020, but the program also had a much different theme than even just a year ago. Instead of centering the activities on sustainability plans like in the past, the staff running the program took AAE in a different direction: analyzing data and preparing data-driven advocacy.

AAE challenges high school students from across Chicago to research data and raise awareness of environmental justice issues that affect local communities. Students analyzed data via mapping tools and other public data sets to identify local communities’ specific concerns and determine how different factors overlap.

“To address sustainability issues, you need to consider not only environmental concerns, but also social and economic factors,” said Argonne’s Learning Center instructor, Jacqueline Otmanski. “The new curriculum for AAE prepares students to strengthen their data analysis skills in order to draw conclusions and develop evidence-based arguments. Furthermore, it empowers them to advocate for communities as STEM leaders, no matter what pathway they choose for their studies and careers.”

Inspired by Argonne’s ongoing research into electrical vehicle accessibility as part of the federal Justice40 initiative to support environmental justice, the AAE program kicked off with a camp-wide data investigation on electric vehicle accessibility. Through this process, students learned data analysis skills. The remaining weeks, students worked on group projects on different environmental justice topics in Chicago, ranging from water runoff, to food accessibility, to health.

In addition, AAE students had the opportunity to visit Argonne and attend its annual Learning on the Lawn poster symposium for research interns — held in person for the first time since 2020. While there, AAE participants also toured several facilities at the lab, including the Smart Energy Plaza and the Center for Transportation Research.

“AAE definitely opened my eyes to the reality of environmental injustice in Chicago and the severity of the problem,” said high school student Meghan Cuddy. She studied air pollution in Chicago for her project and saw how poor air quality harms communities on the south side of the city. “I hope to continue to work in environmental science and to one day help solve the problems that we learned about in the program.”

This year’s focus on building important skills like data analysis and networking left a positive impact on students and staff alike.

“The great thing about AAE is that this is truly a community effort,” said Argonne’s Learning Center program coordinator, Azucena Rodriguez. “Not only do we collaborate with the UChicago for the program, but we design AAE to be accessible for Chicago students. The environmental challenges that students research and find solutions to have direct impact on their communities. These new changes to the curriculum will build ties between Argonne and Chicago communities, and they will empower the next generation of local STEM leaders.”

To learn more about how students discover new possibilities in STEM with Argonne through AAE and other programs at the lab, check out the Argonne Education Instagram page.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

Argonne National Laboratory

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October 26, 2022
JLab Welcomes New Experimental Hall Leader

Newswise — NEWPORT NEWS, VA – The U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has appointed Patrick Carsten Achenbach as the new leader of Jefferson Lab’s Experimental Hall B. The appointment comes after an international search.

Long before he was chosen for this position that leads studies of the tiniest particles in nature, Achenbach was fascinated by the biggest. As a schoolboy in his native Germany, he was intrigued by astronomy and the workings of the universe.

“But then I learned very quickly that this also relates to some fundamental research in physics – in nuclear and particle physics, where we study the Big Bang and the particles created 14 billion years ago, which are now making up the matter in the universe,” said Achenbach.

“It’s not a single topic. It’s all interconnected. Physics really describes the universe on many scales. It describes it on the largest scales of millions and billions of light-years and it can also describe it on the tiniest scales inside of the nucleus,” he said.

The star-struck student went on to become an experimental physicist investigating the fundamental makeup of the universe by using powerful particle accelerators to delve deep inside atomic nuclei.

Now in his new position leading one of four experimental halls at Jefferson Lab, he will promote cutting-edge nuclear physics using the most powerful accelerator of its kind in the world: the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility, or CEBAF. More than 1,600 nuclear physicists worldwide come to CEBAF, a DOE Office of Science user facility, to conduct their research.

Leading an experimental hall

Achenbach began his tenure Sept. 1.

“I’m very happy to be here,” he said. “It’s a great lab, a world-leading lab in this type of accelerator-based nuclear physics. I’m proud to be part of the group here, and of the team.”

An experimental hall relies on a vast network of moving parts and precision instruments, including an injector to produce the particle beam; cryogenics systems to supercool components that accelerate the beam; electromagnets to steer it around the accelerator; detectors that can run as big as a house; complex electronics and computing systems; and a small army of highly skilled technicians, engineers and physicists to keep it all humming.

For each experiment, the particle beam shoots around the nearly mile-long underground racetrack-shaped accelerator at nearly the speed of light. With each lap, the beam gains energy. Once it gains the right amount of energy, it’s directed into an experimental hall, where it smashes into a chosen target. There, detector systems with more than 100,000 electronic channels – or electronic “eyes” – can see and register the fleeting and often rare subatomic particles created in the collision.

“And all of this needs to be coordinated, and all of these great people need to work together,” Achenbach explained. “So that, in the end, we get results out or we get data that can be analyzed and we can do our research, and maybe we have discovered something new, or we understand something new, or we expand our knowledge.”

As hall leader, Achenbach will coordinate staff, instruments and experiments, as well as help choose future experiments from among the recommendations of an international advisory committee and the priorities or restrictions of the hall. As he settles into his new position, he plans to look for ways to best develop the hall even more.

Discussions are underway, he said, to potentially upgrade CEBAF and increase its energy. Greater energy means even more compelling experiments and the potential for even greater discoveries. The lab is also considering producing a different type of beam – a positron beam – for new kinds of experiments, he said. A positron is the antimatter counterpart of an electron.

Such upgrades and enhancements would require adapting the experimental halls to accommodate them.

A background in physics

Achenbach most recently served as a professor of experimental physics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He has a strong background in the operation of experiments and experimental equipment, with leadership roles at electron accelerator and spectrometer facilities. In 2009, he also engaged in research at Jefferson Lab.

He studied physics and mathematics at Justus Liebig University in Giessen and earned a doctorate at Johannes Gutenberg University before conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford.

He has served on the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) program advisory committee, as well as on various executive and collaboration boards and steering and collaboration management committees.

He worked on the H1 inclusive deep inelastic scattering experiments at the German laboratory DESY; in the A2 and TAPS collaborations at the Mainz Microton accelerator (MAMI) to study nucleon resonances and excitations and pion/eta photoproduction; and in A4 collaborations at MAMI to carry out elastic electron scattering, parity violation and strangeness form factor experiments. He was also involved in cosmic ray and atmospheric neutrino science.

He was a member of the A1 Collaboration at Mainz and the PANDA Collaboration at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. He has many years working within the A1 Collaboration on strangeness production, hadron spectroscopy and hypernuclei. He is also involved in the light dark matter searches and beam dump experiment at MESA.

By Tamara Dietrich

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Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, or Jefferson Lab, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility

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October 10, 2022
Watching Plants Switch on Genes

The Science

Biologists often use green fluorescent protein (GFP) to see what happens inside cells. GFP, which scientists first isolated in jellyfish, is a protein that changes light from one color into another. Attaching it to other proteins allows researchers to find out if cells produce those proteins and where within cells to find them. This in turn shows how cells deliver and use genes. The problem is that this usually requires expensive equipment, such as fluorescence microscopes, and it can be time consuming. In this study, researchers describe how a special type of GFP can be used to ‘see’ protein production with the unaided eye. Modifying the genes of plants allowed the team to see GFP production using a simple black light to provide long-wave ultraviolet (UV) light.

The Impact

The research demonstrates real-time imaging of cellular and molecular events in a wide range of plants with the unaided eye and a black-light flashlight. This will enable quick and affordable screening for research and development or for real time monitoring of molecular events in mature plants.

Summary

Reporter genes are attached to other genes of interest to provide an inexpensive, rapid, and sensitive assay for studying gene delivery and gene expression. These reporters have long been an essential tool for live-cell imaging. Today, imaging and analysis are becoming more accessible through the development of UV-visible fluorescent reporters. This research from scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory aimed to advance the use and efficiency of these reporters in two herbaceous plant species (Arabidopsis and tobacco) and two woody plant species (poplar and citrus).

After designing and building a GFP UV reporter protein (eYGFPuv) that provides enhanced signals for all tested plant species, the researchers demonstrated that strong fluorescence could be captured using either a fluorescence microscope or UV light. Moreover, this UV‐excitable reporter can be observed across a wide range of scales from sub‐meter level seedlings to whole plants without need for special emission filters. For instance, by using a simple UV flashlight, the scientists demonstrated how this new reporter can facilitate rapid quantification of transformation efficiency in plant systems. These improved features will make this newly developed GFP-UV reporter a valuable tool for a wide range of applications in plant science research.

Funding

The research was supported by the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI), a Department of Energy (DOE) Research Center and the Secure Ecosystem Engineering and Design (SEED) project funded by the Genomic Science Program of the DOE Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) as part of the Secure Biosystems Design Science Focus Area (SFA).

SEE ORIGINAL STUDY

Department of Energy, Office of Science

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October 7, 2022
After Fire and Monsoons, DESI Resumes Cataloguing the Cosmos

Newswise — On June 11, lightning struck a remote ridge in the Baboquivari Mountain range outside of Tucson, Arizona. Within days, the Contreras Fire had traveled eight miles and climbed Kitt Peak, a 6,800-foot mountain dotted with white telescope domes. Within one was the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the heart of a next-generation sky survey that is creating the largest 3D map of the universe.

Researchers use DESI to study dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of our universe. It’s a clue into the fundamental workings of nature, how the universe evolved, and how it may end.

Collaborators who had spent years designing, building, and running the instrument watched the flames sweep over the observatory’s southern ridge on webcams – until the power went out. They switched to watching the curlicue paths of planes dropping fire retardant.

When the smoke had cleared, teams returned to find something astounding: All of the scientific equipment was intact. For several weeks, they carefully cleaned components and turned DESI’s systems on one by one. On Sept. 10, DESI began imaging the night sky once again.

“We’re relieved to return to our science with equipment that is performing almost as well as it was before the fire,” said Michael Levi, director of the international DESI collaboration and a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which manages the project. “I’m eternally grateful to the firefighters and the crews who secured the site, and their patience and ingenuity getting things running again.”

It’s not entirely business as usual yet, since the fire knocked out power lines and the high-speed network normally used to transmit data. The telescope is temporarily powered by a generator, and the information recorded each night has to take a more circuitous route to researchers around the globe. Each day, the data (roughly 80 gigabytes worth on a clear night, capturing about 150,000 celestial objects) is loaded onto an external hard drive and driven down the winding mountain road, past the recently charred mesquite and rebounding wild grasses, for processing in Tucson.

DESI owes much of the successful restart to quick actions by crews on the mountain who secured the precious equipment.

“We’ve performed tests during the restart and found little loss in performance despite the terrible conditions that the mountain experienced,” said Claire Poppett, one of DESI’s lead observers and a physicist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “The work that the crew did to protect the instrument was phenomenal, and we wouldn’t be in the good shape we are in without it.”

Fire on the mountain

DESI is housed in the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. As the fire approached, non-essential staff evacuated. A small team stayed behind to secure the site as best they could. They rotated the telescope to face away from the oncoming smoke, powered off electronics, and covered the mirror and lenses that image galaxies billions of light-years away.

“The most important thing was the optics,” said Matthew Evatt, the mechanical engineering manager at NSF’s NOIRLab, which operates the Mayall Telescope with funding provided by DOE. “We scrounged around and found tarps and plastic left over from way earlier in DESI.”

Evatt and Bob Stupak, the electronics maintenance supervisor at NOIRLab, climbed ladders and secured the plastic sheets over the 4-meter-diameter mirror using bungee cords, ratchet straps, and electrical tape. They maneuvered the telescope and a scissor lift to access and cover DESI’s corrector barrel, which holds six glass lenses in alignment. Soon, they too evacuated, leaving behind only firefighters and two NOIRLab employees familiar with the site: Fred Wortman and Zade Arnold.

“This place is a second home to me,” said Arnold, the site’s environmental health and safety technician who grew up close to the observatory, which sits on Tohono O’odham land. Rising above the Sonoran Desert below, Kitt Peak (or Iolkam Du’ag) is considered a “Sky Island”: a remote mountaintop with a unique ecosystem, including some unexpected inhabitants, such as bears.

“It’s a little piece of paradise I go to every day, and I wanted to keep it safe,” Arnold said.

As hotshot crews cleared brush, controlled backburns, and put out spot fires, Wortman and Arnold supported their efforts, providing information on the site’s hydrant and water systems. When teams later cut power to avoid potential flare-ups, the hydrant system shut off, so the two rigged a gravity-fed water system for responders to drink and fill their trucks. “Fred and Zade’s efforts were vital,” Levi said.

In the early hours of June 17, the fire swept over the main observatory site, causing the white domes to glow red with reflected firelight.

The fire and smoke wrapped around the peak and continued north, burning a total of around 30,000 acres before being contained. At the observatory, four support buildings burned, but all the scientific equipment and telescopes survived.

Road to recovery

It took several weeks to secure the site and restore basic functions like power and water. The fire had damaged the observatory access road, burning away all of the guardrails and miles of power poles. It was followed closely by monsoons, causing mudslides. With the charred vegetation unable to stabilize the soil, a boulder the size of a car fell onto the road. Crews accessing the site to assess damage and begin clean up traveled together in a daily caravan to minimize disruptions to road repair.

“The amount of work it takes to recover from something like this is always surprising,” said Stupak. “This facility is pretty much a small town up here. We’re pretty isolated. Everything from potable water to data is a huge effort by a lot of people.”

DESI collaborators took a methodical approach, starting up and quadruple-checking one system at a time. Experts looked for any smoke damage, changed out air filters, and cleaned the optical components with a special wash of carbon dioxide. They checked the 5,000 robotic positioners that rotate and lock onto galaxies, and placed the spectrographs (tools that measure the wavelength of light) under vacuum, removing all the air over several days. The last step was turning on sensitive image sensors known as CCDs, which turn light into data and operate in extreme cold. It all worked. When the monsoons finally cleared, DESI resumed cataloguing the cosmos.

The sky survey uses the distance and speed of far-off galaxies, collecting data known as “redshifts.” During the first year of observations leading up to the fire, researchers were already ahead of schedule, having collected 14 million galaxy and quasar redshifts – a whopping 30% of the total they plan to gather during the instrument’s five-year run. The collaboration doesn’t expect any long-term impact from the fire and is working towards a large data release in early 2023.

In the coming months, crews will continue to repair the larger site and improve the instrument, doing additional cleaning on the optics to return them to pre-fire condition.

“It feels really great to be back on sky again,” said Poppett, who has worked on DESI for more than a decade. “The fact that the telescope and instrument is still there is all we need – and it just needs a small tune-up to be as good as before.”

DESI, including operations of the Mayall telescope, is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico, the Ministry of Economy of Spain, and by the DESI member institutions.

Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.

The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.

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Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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October 7, 2022