- Number 325 |
- November 22, 2010
The devil is in the details—the very small details—when it comes to global climate models, and those details are easier to see now, thanks to climate researchers from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The team estimated the impact of small-scale features within a large-scale system for aerosols, which are microscopic particles in the atmosphere that influence climate change, yet aerosol’s influence is not well understood.
Standard wood-plastic composite boards are about half sawdust and half petroleum plastic. But a composite board produced by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, the University of California, Davis, and Washington State University contains nearly equal proportions of sawdust, plastic made by bacteria, and the same harmless bacteria that made the plastic — by eating wastewater.
Physicists working on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) at the DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are now one step closer to solving one of the grand challenges of magnetic fusion research — how to reduce the effect that the hot plasma has on fusion machine walls (or how to tame the plasma-material interface). Plasma is a hot, electrically charged gas used as the fuel for fusion energy production.
Calcium regulates many critical processes within the body, including muscle contraction, the heartbeat, and the release of hormones. But too much calcium can be a bad thing. In excess, it can lead to a host of diseases, such as severe muscle weakness or sudden cardiac death.