| 'Cellular Observatory' will improve human health
Scientists at DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have established a new observatory, but instead of looking to the stars it is a Cellular Observatory designed to focus inward to study the smallest components of living organisms. Pacific Northwest researchers have used a nuclear magnetic resonance microscope imager to obtain chemical information from a living cell without destroying the cell or invading it in the process. And for the first time researchers have been able to do this also on the cell nucleus, the internal control center of the cell. The work is part of a study to understand the impact of the environment, and contaminants in the environment, on human life and health.
Electric bus of the future
A new motor controller with advanced soft-switching circuitry developed at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory promises to make electric and hybrid vehicles more practical. The 100-kilowatt inverter and controller, which are being tested aboard an electric bus in Chattanooga, Tenn., represent breakthroughs in several areas, including cost, volume, weight and reliability. The soft-switching circuitry helps reduce damaging power spikes and increases efficiency. Early results are promising, according to ORNL and its partners, Chattanooga Area Regional Transit Authority, Advanced Vehicle Systems and the Electric Transit Vehicle Institute. Researchers plan to operate the system on a test track and city route and collect and evaluate data.
Lab takes it all out of the air
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| Surface of a "macroreticular" resin bead. |
Lara Gundel of DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with colleagues in academia and industry, has developed "denuders" that measure different phases of airborne pollution separately and simultaneously. Air samples are sucked through tubes lined with resin beads that can trap molecules of organic gases in their microscopic pores; fine particles pass through the tube and are collected on filters. Gundel first used denuder technology, not normally employed with organic chemicals, to measure tobacco smoke. Her designs, dubbed Integrated Organic Vapor/Particle Sampler (IOVPS) and Integrated Organic Gas and Particle Sampler (IOGAPS), now measure air pollution under a range of indoor and outdoor conditions. Standard air samplers fitted with denuders outperformed samplers without them in EPA field studies.
Microcapsules test laboratory accuracy
Blind and double-blind tests for laboratories analyzing volatile organics in soil samples have been impossible until now-a process to create soil standards for these compounds did not exist. A scientist at DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory has patented such a process by microencapsulating such VOCs as trichloroethene (TCE), benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, tetrachloroethylene and xylenes, among others. Mixing the microcapsules uniformly in soil samples results in true blind or double blind tests to measure the accuracy of a laboratory's analysis. The results can improve soil characterizations, increase efficiency and reduce costs of soil site remediation. The process is inexpensive, too, utilizing commercially available raw materials.
Neutrino hunters break ground underground
Deep in a former iron mine, now a Minnesota state park, on July 20, scientists and government officials wielded pickaxes to chip away, at least symbolically, at the mysteries surrounding the subatomic particles called neutrinos. The undergroundbreakers, including DOE's Dr. John O'Fallon and Fermilab Director Michael Witherell, took the first steps in carving out a huge cavern, half a mile underground, to hold a 5,000-ton particle detector. Beginning in 2003, physicists of the 200-member MINOS experiment, which includes scientists from Argonne National Laboratory, will use it to explore the question of neutrino mass, using a beam of neutrinos from Fermilab's Main Injector accelerator 450 miles away.
Nitrate waste breakdown
A team of scientists at DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed and installed a technology at the Lab's Liquid Radioactive Waste Treatment Facility that converts nitrates into harmless nitrogen gas. The technology uses a transition metal/acid mixture that strips oxygen atoms from nitrates, wastes typically generated in the mining, chemical, farming and nuclear power industries and during plutonium production. A number of industries have expressed interest in the process, which is more efficient and less expensive than reverse osmosis, evaporation and thermal or biological destruction, methods currently used worldwide to destroy or remove nitrate wastes.
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Bigdog's nose for ions: It's not cold and wet, it's high tech
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| Dave Atkinson
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Six-foot-three Dave Atkinson's sports nickname, Bigdog, is apropos for work too. As an analytical chemist at the DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, he's developing gadgets capable of sniffing out illicit drugs, explosive chemicals and environmental pollutants with the sensitivity of a canine nose.
Atkinson's passion is ion mobility spectrometry, a field of analytical chemistry that examines the behavior of ionized molecules in the gas phase. An IMS apparatus sucks in volatile molecules, zaps them with charging ionization and identifies the resulting molecular ions by how quickly they speed through an electric field. The mobility of an ionized molecule is influenced by its size and shape, so measuring its mobility can divulge its identity.
"This technology has serious analytical advantages," says Atkinson. "Its remarkable sensitivity, its ruggedness, its portability-the things it does, it does very well."
Atkinson's interest in IMS hails from his graduate school days, when he took IMS out of the lab and into the real world as a field screening tool. Since IMS functions at normal temperatures and pressures, and works best with low concentrations of molecules, it's destined for the great outdoors. "We're undergoing a paradigm shift in applied research from the lab to the field," says Atkinson. "Ion mobility spectrometry is part of that revolution."
Portable IMS devices have potential in such diverse areas as agriculture, environmental management, and anti-terrorism strategies-wherever organic molecules need to be detected and identified.
Now, the intellectually driven zymurgist heads up the Center for Ion Mobility Spectrometry, an INEEL-based collaboration between universities, industry and national labs to advance applied IMS research. The Center brings together the best researchers from the small IMS niche-there are only a handful of research groups who work on ion mobility spectrometry, although interest is growing internationally.
That makes him a Bigdog in a little field.
Submitted by DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory |
