Science Highlights

In oilseed crops like canola, yellow-seeded varieties generally produce more oil than brown-seeded varieties. Camelina, a bioenergy crop closely related to canola, usually has brown seeds. Scientists have now disrupted genes called TT8 that are responsible for making seeds brown, producing an engineered camelina with light yellow seeds that accumulates more than 20% more oil than ordinary varieties.

Pockets of instability called magnetic islands in the plasma in a fusion device can disrupt plasma confinement. Scientists predict that islands grow because of the temperatures of electrons and ions in a plasma flattening out within the island, but ion temperatures have not been previously measured. In this new research, researchers found that contrary to expectations, the ion temperature profile did not flatten but instead exhibited a steep change across islands.

One of the methods scientists use to study quantum many-body systems is the ab initio approach, but some ab initio methods run into severe computational problems when using realistic interactions. This study introduces wavefunction matching and uses it to perform lattice simulations with realistic interactions. This allows scientists to make calculations that were once impossible.

Researchers have developed a way to consistently produce 17-4 PH stainless steel using additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. The rapid change in temperatures that occur in these materials after they are heated by the lasers in 3D printers make it difficult to achieve the toughness needed for 17-4 PH steel. This research used bright X-ray beams to observe those fast changes in real time, then altered the chemical composition to compensate for them.

Researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams reached a new milestone in isotope studies, accelerating a high-power beam of uranium ions to a record 10.4 kilowatts of continuous beam power to a target. The beam enabled scientists to produce and identify three new isotopes, gallium-88, arsenic-93, and selenium-96.

Researchers studied stress effects in novel “superalloys” made from two 3D-printed high-strength, high-heat resistant metals. The study found that heat treatments reduce stress created in the materials during manufacturing. It also found that stresses are more likely to be caused by certain manufacturing parameters than they are by the metal’s chemical composition.

The original FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles defined best practices to maximize the reuse of datasets. Researchers have now adapted these principles for scientific datasets and research software. This work demonstrates how to combine FAIR datasets and FAIR AI models to quickly characterize materials at Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source and how to link the Advanced Photon Source with the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.