To study the effects of oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, researchers collected deep-water samples from across the Gulf of Mexico and analyzied their physical, chemical, and microbiological properties using a variety of techniques, including SR-FTIR. Read more »
Science Highlights
Platinum Nanoclusters Out-Perform Single Crystals
Researchers have found that under high pressure—comparable to the pressures at which many industrial technologies operate—platinum surfaces can change their structure dramatically in response to the presence of high-coverage reactants. Read more »
Real-Time Chemical Imaging of Bacterial Biofilm Development
Almost all bacteria can form biofilms—dynamic communities of cells enclosed in self-produced matrices of polymers. Researchers have developed a robust and label-free method to probe the chemical underpinnings of developing bacterial biofilms. Read more »
Mechanical Behavior of Indium Nanostructures
Indium is a key material in lead-free solder applications for microelectronics due to its excellent wetting properties, extended ductility, and high electrical conductivity. Researchers have investigated the small-scale mechanics of indium nanostructures. Read more »
Nanoscale Chemical Imaging of a Working Catalyst
Researchers identified the chemical species present for an iron-based Fischer–Tropsch synthesis catalyst and to image their distribution on the nanoscale. When developed further, this new tool may give chemists the ability to design and tailor catalysts for maximum selectivity and efficiency in a wide range of chemical processes. Read more »
Reaction-Driven Restructuring of Bimetallic Nanoparticle Catalysts
Researchers have used an ambient-pressure x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (APXPS) apparatus to demonstrate that bimetallic nanoparticle catalysts can undergo profound structural and chemical changes in response to reactive environments at ambient pressures, thereby opening the way for engineering catalysts with enhanced activity and selectivity. Read more »
Extracellular Proteins Promote Zinc Sulfide Aggregation
Researchers from the ALS, Berkeley Lab’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM), and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory analyzed biofilm samples rich in zinc sulfide and dominated by sulfate-reducing bacteria, which were collected from lead–zinc mine waters.
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Particles from Comet 81P/Wild 2 Viewed by ALS Microscopes
NASA’s $200-million, seven-year-long Stardust mission returned to Earth thousands of tiny particles snagged from the coma of comet 81P/Wild 2. Four ALS beamlines and the researchers using them were among the hundreds of scientists and dozens of experimental techniques in facilities around the world that contributed to the preliminary examination of the first samples.
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First Detailed Look at RNA Dicer
Scientists have gotten their first detailed look at the molecular structure of an enzyme that Nature has been using for eons to help silence unwanted genetic messages: Dicer, an enzyme that plays a critical role in a process known as RNA interference.
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Snapshots of Ribozyme Reaction States Reveal Structural Switch
RNA, like protein, can sometimes function as an enzyme (ribozyme) to speed biochemical reaction rates. But how does RNA, a simple polymer, enhance reaction rates by at least a million fold? Researchers obtained the structures of a ribozyme trapped in different states of its catalytic cycle, showing how a change in the RNA conformation governs the reaction mechanism. Read more »