(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
A difficult-to-describe nanoscale object called a magnetic skyrmion – which can be thought of as spinning circles of magnetism – might one day yield new microelectronic devices that can do more while consuming less power. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and Western Digital Corporation (San Jose, CA) have now made three-dimensional (3D) X-ray images of magnetic skyrmions. “Our results provide a foundation for nanoscale metrology for spintronics devices,” said Peter Fischer, the scientist who led this study. The research was conducted in part at the Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Berkeley Lab.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation)
A nanocrystalline material is made up of many tiny crystals, but as they grow, the nanocrystalline material can weaken. Researchers from Lehigh University, Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories have discovered that the key to maintaining the stability of nanocrystalline materials at high temperatures lies in triple junctions – corners where three of these nanocrystals meet. What the scientists found is that when certain atoms are added to form an alloy, they prefer to occupy sites at these triple junctions, which prevents the nanocrystalline material from losing its strength over time.

(Funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a new blood test that diagnoses heart attacks in minutes rather than hours. The heart of the invention is a tiny chip with a groundbreaking nanostructured surface on which blood is tested. The chip’s “metasurface” enhances electric and magnetic signals during Raman spectroscopy analysis, making heart attack biomarkers visible in seconds. The tool is sensitive enough to flag heart attack biomarkers that might not be detected with current tests. “We’re talking about speed, we’re talking about accuracy, and we’re talking of the ability to perform measurements outside of a hospital,” said Ishan Barman, one of the scientists involved in this study.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy)
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Rice University; and Penn State University have revealed an adaptive response with a ferroelectric device, which responds to light pulses in a way that resembles the plasticity of neural networks. This behavior could find application in energy-efficient microelectronics. The material is laden with networked islands or domains that are nanometers in size and can rearrange themselves in response to light pulses.

(Funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst; The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, CT; the University of Bern in Switzerland; the University of Auckland in New Zealand; Guangdong University of Technology in China; Central South University of Forestry and Technology in Changsha, China; the Chinese Academy of Forestry in Hangzhou, China; and Beijing Forestry University in China have shown that nutrients on the nanometer scale can not only blunt some of the worst effects of heavy metal and metalloid contamination, but increase crop yields and nutrient content. The scientists found that nanomaterials are more effective than conventional fertilizers at mitigating the harmful effects of polluted soil (by 38.3%), can enhance crop yields (by 22.8%) and the nutritional value of those crops (by 30%), as well as combat plant stress (by 21.6%) due to metal and metalloid pollution.