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Federal Officials Testify on the Implementation of the CHIPS & Science Act
Officials from NASA, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy testify to the implementation of the CHIPS & Science Act before a House Science, Space and Technology subcommittee.
Harnessing abundant electricity from the sun, and other CU Boulder science tapped for Genesis Mission
CU Boulder was awarded more than $2.1 million in grants for the U.S. Department of Energy's highly competitive Genesis Mission. The science behind the awards
http://democrats-energycommerce.house.gov/media/press-releases/ec-democratic-leaders-demand-answers-energy-secretary-wright-after-he-lied
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Energy and Commerce Committee Democratic leaders are demanding answers from Secretary of Energy Chris Wright after the Department of Energy (DOE) admitted it has been targeting grant cancellations toward states that did not vote for Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
DOE Announces Up to $400M for Basic Research to Advance the Frontiers of Science
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced its annual funding opportunity of up to $400 million to advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge and lay the foundation for future technologies and innovation. The funding delivers on Executive Order Restoring Gold Standard Science by supporting rigorous, transparent, and mission-driven research across […]
Stony Brook University Researchers Chosen for Landmark DOE Genesis Mission AI-for-Science Awards
More than $2.4M will support collaborations with Brookhaven National Lab and other institutions to address complex science and technology challenges WASHINGTON, D.C., July 22, 2026 – Researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University) secured five inaugural awards through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, a national AI-for-science
Five Berkeley Lab Scientists Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards
Five scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have received Early Career Research Program (ECRP) awards from the Department of Energy. The ECRP program, now in its 16th year, was established to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Recipients use the funding to pursue projects that have the potential to solve scientific challenges and advance the country’s STEM capabilities. To be eligible for the program, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professor at a U.S. academic institution, or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility, who is within 10 years of having earned their doctorate. Awards to an institution of higher education will be approximately $875,000 over five years, and awards to a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility will be approximately $2,750,000 over five years. This year’s Berkeley Lab awardees and their projects are listed below: Timon Heim: Better detectors for more powerful particle colliders Timon Heim is a staff scientist in the Physics Division. His ECRP project will develop a new type of detector that can track the particles generated by collisions in particle colliders with high spatial and temporal resolution. Current detectors in use at high-energy colliders, like the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, can track the trajectory and measure momentum of particles, but they can’t track a particle’s time of arrival with sufficient precision to discern from which of the many particle interactions they originate. Heim’s proposed technology — called a 4D tracking detector, because it captures data about particles’ positions in space and time — aims to solve this challenge, allowing researchers to glean more precise data from collision experiments to uncover new insights into fundamental forces and potentially discover new particles. The enhanced capabilities of 4D detectors will be a necessity for experiments at future colliders, such as the Muon Collider or Future Circular Collider. The project will develop custom microelectronics that process the signal of a pixelated silicon sensor that can register charged particles passing through it in an extreme radiation environment that these colliders produce during operation. The goal is to measure individual particles’ position with 50-micro-meter spatial and 50 pico-second (one trillionth of a second) temporal precision, for an incoming flux of around 1 billion particles per second per square centimeter. Harrison Lisabeth: Studying underground processes to unleash abundant energy Harrison Lisabeth is a research scientist in the Energy Geoscience Division focused on combining real-world experiments and AI to guide development of geothermal energy systems. His project will explore how deep underground rock formations – where geothermal wells are dug – are stressed by chemical reactions of the minerals and mechanical strain from movements in the Earth. A better understanding of subsurface stresses is essential to engineer safe and reliable geothermal wells that access the heat of deep rocks to produce electricity. It is estimated that the U.S. could generate ten times the amount of energy needed to power the grid using geothermal sources. Lisabeth plans to simulate how minerals grow, dissolve, and influence the behavior of surrounding rock in geothermal reservoirs by tracking chemical changes in rock samples under pressure in the lab. The project will also develop machine learning models to predict geologic strain based on field measurements and refine existing models that describe how common rock types deform under stress. Combining these approaches, Lisabeth hopes to develop a framework to predict stress to improve stability and longevity of geothermal wells. Daniel Carney: Pushing the quantum boundaries of particle measurement Daniel Carney is a staff scientist in the Physics Division who uses quantum information science to study particle physics and gravity. At very small scales, “quantum noise” — random fluctuations from the act of measurement — can drown out faint signals from rare processes. Carney’s ECRP project, “Fundamental Physics at the Quantum Limits of Measurement,” aims to build a new mechanical quantum sensor that can measure extremely small particle interactions below the limits of that quantum noise. The approach uses lasers to hold a tiny bead containing radioactive atoms; when one decays, the system measures the bead’s motion and the energy of any particles emitted. The experiment’s initial goal is to search for heavy sterile neutrinos, hypothetical particles predicted by some extensions of the Standard Model. The system could also help measure the mass of the neutrino, study the way particles interact through the electromagnetic and weak forces, and hunt for low-mass dark matter — all unsolved mysteries in particle physics. Callum Wilkinson: Using machine learning to demystify neutrinos Callum Wilkinson is a staff scientist in the Physics Division and part of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) hosted by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. DUNE will create an intense beam of neutrinos that interact in detectors in Illinois and, after an 800-mile journey through the earth, in massive detectors in South Dakota. By precisely measuring neutrinos and how they change, researchers will get a better understanding of their fundamental properties and whether they are responsible for why there is so much more matter than antimatter in our universe. Wilkinson’s ECRP project will apply two machine learning techniques to improve the analysis of DUNE’s data and enhance the experiment’s precision. One approach will look for hidden patterns in how neutrinos interact and produce low-energy particles, while the other will help correct for distortions in what the detectors record. The methods will be tested on one of DUNE’s prototype detectors and could be used in other neutrino experiments, improving their measurements and helping scientists build better models. Aditi Krishnapriyan: Machine learning methods that scale as datasets grow Aditi Krishnapriyan is a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and assistant professor at UC Berkeley. Her project, awarded through UC Berkeley, will develop machine learning methods that scale with dataset size for modeling complex, multi-scale phenomena. The resulting tools can be applied in a wide range of research, including the study of new electrolytes for batteries or the examination of molecular interactions. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Department of Energy Selects 36th Class of Computational Science Graduate Fellows
Twenty-nine students working toward achieving doctorates in fields that emphasize the use of computing and mathematics have been selected for the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) program.
Court rejects government's energy "emergency" that kept coal plant open
The Department of Energy declared an "emergency" when none existed.
Scientists build successful 'cloud in a box'
In a quiet laboratory, a team of atmospheric scientists and engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory recently gathered around a workstation to watch as little ...
Powering America's Genesis Mission: Microsoft's commitment to scientific discovery
Today, we’re excited to share a long-term commitment to the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, backed by a $60 million investment designed to accelerate AI for science and the breakthroughs it can deliver for the country. This deepened commitment includes Microsoft’s new Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge coordination hub and program office, otherwise...
When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter
Fusion at high temperatures powers the sun and, if harnessed, could provide a potential source of energy here on Earth. But controlling fusion reactions has other benefits. The process also generates subatomic particles called neutrons that are used in a range of applications spanning medicine, research, and national security. Now, scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that the materials surrounding a fusion reaction can dramatically increase how often it occurs, particularly at low energies where fusion is rare. The study was published July 18 in Nature Communications. Their approach sets up a way to study and engineer nuclear reactions within solid materials, opening a new field of “materials-driven fusion.” Instead of designing materials just to survive the harsh conditions of fusion, researchers might be able to design materials that boost the reaction in specific conditions, similar to the way catalysts speed up chemical processes. “It gives you a new knob to turn that you didn’t have before,” said Arun Persaud, head of the Fusion Science & Ion Beam Technology group in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division. “If we understand this effect better, it opens the door to engineering new materials that would affect the fusion rate under certain conditions. Someday future progress might enable more compact and efficient neutron generators, which have all kinds of applications, like cargo screening, planetary science, and medical therapy and imaging.” In the experiment, researchers used two different methods to pack deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen atoms that is often used in fusion, into thin foils of palladium and titanium. They then fired a beam of deuterium ions at the foils at different energies and measured how often fusion happened. Then they compared the rates from the different materials and methods with the “bare” fusion reaction (not in a material). The team found that fusion rates depended on how the deuterium was loaded into the metal foils. The biggest effect was at the lowest energies, below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV), where theory predicts fusion rates drop off sharply. Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) Researchers are not exactly sure why that’s happening, though they have some ideas and ways to test them. The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse. Tuning the electronic structure, defects, and composition of materials could help make nuclear reactions happen more readily. “It comes down to better understanding the mechanism so that we can try to enhance it,” said corresponding author Jeremy Munday, a professor at UC Davis. “We’ve seen that we can increase fusion rates, but what is the limit? Can we bring it to lower temperatures or energies? There’s obviously a lot of interest and excitement about fusion, so if there’s something we can learn about the physics at these lower energy scales, maybe there’s something we can translate to other areas of nuclear science.” The team plans to explore a wider range of materials and continue probing the unexpected fusion plateau at lower energies. Their work establishes a reproducible experimental platform to study how solid materials influence nuclear reactions, creating a new area of research that links fusion science with materials science and chemistry. “The work shows conclusively that the material environment where fusion occurs at low temperatures is an active participant rather than a passive container,” said Cameron Geddes, director of ATAP. “That adds a new dimension to fusion research.” This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Discovery Supercomputer’s first applications selected for Day-One Science
Scientific computing experts at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have selected the first nine research projects that will run on Discovery, the nation’s next flagship supercomputer, slated for deployment in 2028. The projects will be developed through the Discovery Center for Accelerated Application Readiness program at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The program is designed to ensure that a suite of leading-edge scientific applications is optimized and ready to deliver results as soon as Discovery becomes operational.
Danforth Plant Science Center to Lead Multi-Disciplinary Research to Enhance Stress Resilience in Bioenergy Sorghum
ST. LOUIS, MO., December 10, 2025 – Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., Principal Investigator and member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will lead a multi-institutional project to deepen the understanding of sorghum, a versatile bioenergy crop, and its response to environmental challenges. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program supports the three-year $2.
2025 in Review: ORNL’s Top Science News Stories
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory marked another year of research driven by innovation and collaboration in 2025, as reflected in the laboratory’s most-read stories. The year’s top story announced two new AI supercomputers, establishing ORNL’s vital role as part of DOE’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative to accelerate science through artificial intelligence.
RM Science Bowl triumphs with most successful season in recent history
Someone slams the buzzer, but the molecular biology question has only been half-read. With just enough confidence to risk it all, they answer, knowing that it could make the difference between winning and losing the match. Science Bowl is a fast paced competition for high schoolers sponsored by the Department of Energy that tests students’...
PPPL, Princeton Launch Plasma Science Research Program
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University have launched a new graduate research
North Hollywood Senior High School Wins 34th Annual LADWP Regional Science Bowl Competition
Winning Team to Represent Los Angeles Region in the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Science Bowl® Competition in Washington, D.C. LOS ANGELES (February 21, 2026) – Demonstrating an exceptional command of advanced knowledge in all areas of science and mathematics, North Hollywood Senior High School Team A claimed first place at the […]
A deep dive into climate change
Some policymakers continue to question the science of climate change, despite the growing evidence of significant damage to life on land and in the ocean.Katja Matthes, director of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, believes the ongoing attempts to politicise climate science and discredit researchers are hindering international cooperation and public understanding. The ocean provides clear evidence of the extent to which changes are occurring, she says.“We are seeing severe, unprecedented and accelerating changes in the ocean — warming ocean temperatures, acidification and oxygen depletion — that are destabilising the most important system that makes life on this planet possible,” Matthes explains. Visible signs of these changes include the melting of ice sheets in the Arctic and Greenland. Deeper down, the growing frequency of hypoxia — or oxygen-deprived “dead zones”, where marine life can no longer survive — in the Baltic and record-high Mediterranean surface temperatures are indicators of the “dramatic warming” of the ocean, she adds.The ocean, which covers around 70% of the Earth’s surface, acts as a vital carbon sink, absorbing around 30% of the planet’s carbon dioxide (CO2) and 90% of the excess heat. However, the global ocean surface temperature has risen by an average of half a degree Celsius since 1982, according to the EU Copernicus observatory. More significant rises have been recorded in the Mediterranean, Black, Baltic and other shallower seas.Some ocean temperature increases do occur naturally, such as during El Niño events. But sustained rises can trigger extreme weather on land — including droughts, floods and catastrophic storms — while also harming marine ecosystems. Only 10% of marine species have been studied, Matthes notes, “so the consequences might be even more severe than we know.”Fostering European cooperation amid uncertaintyMatthes, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, is a professor of atmospheric physics as well as director of GEOMAR. She serves as one of Kiel’s ambassadors to Science Comes to Town (SCTT), an EU-funded programme that aims to promote science’s role in society and strengthen cross-border collaboration in research, innovation and sustainability. SCTT is hosted by the coastal cities of Kiel, Brest (in France) and Split (in Croatia).The SCTT project also provides a platform for raising awareness and understanding between scientists and the public about major issues, such as climate change. Having worked on both sides of the Atlantic, Matthes is frustrated by recent attempts to erode decades of international climate collaboration and question the credibility of research. Earlier this year, the US administration delivered a major blow to global cooperation by withdrawing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global climate organisations, claiming they were “contrary to the interests of the United States.”In addition, a US Department of Energy (DOE) report cast doubt on the latest IPCC climate assessment, which was published in 2024. As a contributing author to the IPCC study, Matthes says the DOE sought to discredit scientists like herself. “Climate change is not a matter of opinion, it really exists and we are witnessing dramatic changes,” she notes. “It’s not climate change as a whole that is being targeted, but scientists and their research.”Other US actions have also hit home for Matthes, who spent three years at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The White House has announced plans to close the facility, a move that was “pretty tough” due to the German scientist’s personal connections with the staff and their reputation for excellence.Changing the narrative on climate changeEurope’s scientific community remains a driving force on climate research and collaboration. As one of the world’s leading marine research institutions, GEOMAR attracts students from more than 50 countries and plays an important role in global observation initiatives that contribute to understanding and protecting the ocean basins. At a European level, GEOMAR works closely with other top marine research facilities, including France’s Ifremer, an SCTT partner in Brest. GEOMAR has also developed innovative and safe strategies for removing unexploded wartime munitions from the seabed, which release toxic substances that pose a danger to humans and the marine environment. Through the Horizon Europe MMinE-SwEEPER project, this knowledge has been transferred to the European level.These initiatives are examples of how local action can have a global impact, Matthes says, and how Europe can strengthen climate research and partnerships. “This is a chance for Europe to step up and work on climate cooperation and agreements,” she notes. “Climate change is an international problem and a real threat, and we need more speed on climate action than we have now.”Matthes believes her fellow scientists need to communicate that climate change is not only a threat, but an opportunity to find solutions. “We need to change our narrative and expand our strategic alliances with those who are willing,” she says, “and luckily there are a lot of willing people and countries.”Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.
Trump administration admits grants, including to Minnesota Power, were canceled over politics
In court filings, a Department of Energy attorney said the criteria for canceling grants in October 2025 were “based solely” on whether the projects were planned in Democratic states.
New MatterChat Model Helps AI to ‘See’ the Language of Science
From writing emails to generating computer code, much of the artificial intelligence prevalent in our daily lives has succeeded by mastering one domain: text. However, this leaves a major blind spot in the physical sciences, where models depend on the high-resolution, three-dimensional data of the physical world, like the intricate lattice of atoms in a crystal. Delivering on the promise of using AI for science requires teaching these data-driven text models to seamlessly “talk to” physics-based models. Now, a new AI framework from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), called MatterChat, solves this problem by creating a specialized “bridge.” It connects the conversational power of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a physics-based AI that models “interatomic potentials”: the complex physical forces between atoms. The resulting system already significantly outperforms general-purpose AI tools like GPT-4 at predicting material properties, and the team hopes it can accelerate scientific discovery by serving as a robust research partner that provides grounded insights and generates step-by-step instructions for synthesizing novel materials. A paper describing this work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence. “Traditional simulations can provide the physical rigor required for materials science, yet their computational cost remains prohibitive for high-throughput screening. Conversely, while LLMs excel at rapid knowledge synthesis, they inherently lack the ‘structural vision’ to interpret materials directly from their underlying atomic coordinates,” said Yingheng Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and lead author on the paper. “MatterChat was built to solve this dilemma, empowering LLMs with a structural ‘vision’ that allows researchers to leverage their full potential for solving complex, real-world materials challenges.” Empowering language models to solve complex challenges in materials science To build MatterChat, the Berkeley Lab team drew inspiration from technologies like Vision Question Answering (VQA) and Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. In these tasks, AI must translate high-level text concepts into visual images, or vice versa. Doing so requires developers to build tools that “bridge” two fundamentally different forms of data. The researchers adapted this concept to the physical sciences. With MatterChat, they created a “bridge model” that successfully connects an LLM’s general knowledge with the deep understanding of the atomic-scale world encoded in scientific interatomic potentials. Until now, researchers using LLMs to solve materials problems usually had to feed them raw data files as if they were just strings of text. It’s like asking an AI to understand a complex 3D engine based only on a parts list: the LLM can read the names, but it can’t “see” how the atoms fit together in space. MatterChat solves this by training a specialized AI bridge model, pre-trained on millions of crystal structures and an LLM, to align the LLM’s representation of the world with the interatomic potential’s representation of the world. The bridge model can translate physical insights into a format the LLM can actually understand. By giving the LLM these “scientific eyes”— a scientific “inductive bias” in the terminology of AI — the Berkeley Lab team has transformed it into a robust research tool capable of providing grounded scientific insights into complex materials challenges, such as predicting thermal stability or analyzing electronic band gaps. “We think of atoms as living in a physical space, but from a machine learning perspective, they are just vectors living in some very non-trivially structured manifold in a high-dimensional Euclidean space; and, of course, the same is true for the sentences and paragraphs that we use to express our ideas about those atoms,” said co-author Michael Mahoney, Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SDD) AI Initiative Research Lead. “The bridge model basically gets those two structures to ‘talk with’ each other.” As a proof-of-concept of this general approach, the team trained their bridge model on a dataset curated by pairing nearly 143,000 stable atomic structures from the Materials Project with their corresponding physical properties. This training data was automatically assembled using the Materials Project’s API and deliberately enriched with properties fundamental to microelectronics design — like formation energy and bandgap — allowing MatterChat to learn the complex patterns connecting a material’s atomic blueprint to its functional performance. To validate their model, the researchers benchmarked MatterChat against a suite of other AI systems, from general-purpose LLMs to other specialized scientific AI methods. The results show that MatterChat consistently outperformed its competitors across a range of tasks. The model was more accurate in classifying material types and demonstrated superior precision in predicting numerical properties. For example, it excelled at predicting a material’s bandgap, a property critical for designing new electronics from high-capacity energy storage to next-generation computer chips. “Our design is significantly more efficient because we don’t have to build a massive AI model from the ground up,” said co-author Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR. “Instead, we take two powerful, pre-trained models — a structural encoder for materials physics and an open-source LLM — and use them off-the-shelf. The only component we actually train is the lightweight ‘bridge model’ that translates between them. It’s the difference between building an entire car factory and simply designing a smart adapter that connects a world-class engine to a world-class navigation system. This approach is not only computationally efficient, but also makes the system modular, so we can easily upgrade components or adapt the bridge for other scientific domains in the future.” Crucially, this modular design highlights exactly how institutions like Berkeley Lab and the Department of Energy are carving out a highly valuable niche in the booming AI landscape. Rather than competing with Silicon Valley tech giants to build ever-larger language models from scratch, the lab is focusing on the specialized connective tissue that makes commercial AI useful for hardcore science. Because the bridge model approach underlying MatterChat is forward-compatible, it is perfectly positioned to leverage these parallel tracks of innovation. As Mahoney pointed out, “We expect that industry will continue to develop improved LLMs, and we expect domain scientists and facilities will continue to generate new data. An important part of scientific machine learning is not simply to solve problems on today’s data, but instead to develop general methods that will be forward-compatible with orders of magnitude more data, whether from scientific domains or from LLMs.” According to Yao, the MatterChat project, which was initially developed and enhanced with funding from a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program, will now expand its capabilities. In a collaboration with Fermilab, MatterChat is already contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission project — called Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS) — that aims to speed up the development of next-generation, high-speed, radiation-hardened detectors for challenging particle physics experiments by using advanced 3D integrated circuits (chiplets) and AI-driven data analysis. In addition to the LDRD support, the team also credits supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab, with MatterChat’s success. “We are incredibly grateful to NERSC; this research simply would not have happened without access to the Perlmutter supercomputer through their AI for Science program,” said Tang. Wenbin Xu, a NERSC postdoctoral fellow at the time, was also a major co-author of the work, as was Benjamin Erichson, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s SDD, highlighting the benefits of AMCR-SDD collaboration on AI for science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
ORNL names Kate Evans associate lab director for biological, environmental systems science
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Katherine (Kate) Evans as associate laboratory director for the Biological and Environmental Systems Science Directorate (BESSD). Evans will lead the directorate as it advances the science and technology needed to strengthen energy security, safeguard infrastructure and accelerate biotechnology innovation.
Stanford and SLAC to lead Genesis Mission projects
The U.S. Department of Energy announced the first phase of funding for projects using artificial intelligence to tackle the nation’s most complex science and technology challenges, including six led by Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The Centennial State’s nuclear energy opportunity
Colorado was given a clear opportunity earlier this year. On Jan. 28, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking potential hosts for Nuclear Energy Innovation Campuses — an early-stage process designed to identify states serious about shaping the next generation of energy development. What followed was not hesitation from local […]
Advancing the next era of national science
OpenAI outlines its commitment to advancing American science working with the U.S. Department of Energy and national labs to use frontier AI to accelerate discovery.
LZ Sees Surprising Result in Search for Dark Matter
Key Takeaways Dark matter is the mysterious substance that accounts for the vast majority of matter in our universe. LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) is a world-leading dark matter detector and specializes in searching for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. A new LZ study found one particle interaction that is difficult to explain with known background processes and could potentially have been caused by a WIMP. LZ continues to run to see if additional data strengthens or weakens the hint of a dark matter interaction. For the better part of a century, people have been trying to understand dark matter. This invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected. Determining exactly what it is remains one of the biggest questions about our world. Now, a new analysis from the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment has recorded a single particle interaction that researchers have great difficulty explaining with known background signals from normal matter. The result does not yet meet the statistical threshold required to claim a discovery, but is the most compelling hint of dark matter reported by the experiment to date. LZ is an international collaboration of 250 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions. The detector is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and operates nearly one mile below ground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. The experiment uses 10 tonnes of ultrapure liquid xenon to search for dark matter and is optimized to look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. The results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan. The paper will be released on the online repository arXiv and submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. “We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University and the spokesperson for LZ. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.” The LZ collaboration studies experimental data in batches. In the new result, researchers analyzed 220 live days of data collected between March 2023 and April 2024. The collaboration had previously searched this dataset for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions. The new analysis searched for a broader range of possible WIMP interactions that could deposit more energy in the detector. LZ is particularly sensitive to such signals while also minimizing false positives. “This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events,” said Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and lead author of the study. “We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter.” If the anomalous event was caused by dark matter, the WIMP that generated it would likely have a mass of at least 200 GeV/c2 (gigaelectronvolts), or more than 200 times the mass of a proton. It would also suggest a specific type of interaction between WIMPs and ordinary matter beyond the simplest model. The LZ results have not reached “5-sigma” significance, the statistical threshold considered a discovery in physics. The new analysis is 2.6 sigma, meaning there is approximately a 0.5% chance that the event could be explained by known backgrounds. With additional data, researchers can test whether the finding continues to grow in significance or fades away. LZ has already accumulated the world’s largest dark matter dataset and will continue to accrue WIMP search data at SURF, substantially improving their search statistics. LZ searches for dark matter by looking for signature flashes of light from energy deposited in the detector. The collaboration leverages multiple methods to prevent or account for particle interactions caused by normal matter. This includes the mile of rock that shields the detector from cosmic rays from space, a water tank and outer detectors that protect the central detector from background neutrons, and a suite of computational tools that disentangle particle interactions and reject dark matter mimics. “Outlier events in the data are not unexpected, but they usually stand out as a background of some kind when you look at them deeper,” said Aaron Manalaysay, a physicist at Berkeley Lab and the chair of LZ’s Institutional Board. “This is the first example in any experiment I’ve worked on of an outlier that appears valid in every way. Of course, we’re still twisting our brains trying to think if there’s a rare background mechanism we could’ve missed, but it’s thrilling to wonder if this could be the first hint of a dark-matter observation.” LZ is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy and Nuclear Physics, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. LZ is also supported by the Science & Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; the Swiss National Science Foundation; the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics; and the Institute for Basic Science, Korea. Thirty-nine institutions of higher education and advanced research provided support to LZ. The LZ collaboration acknowledges the assistance of the Sanford Underground Research Facility. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Discovery Supercomputer’s First Applications Selected for Day-One Science
Scientific computing experts at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have selected the first nine research projects that will run on Discovery, the nation’s next flagship supercomputer, slated for deployment in 2028.The projects will be developed through the Discovery Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).
Los Alamos to Play Key Role in Renewed Quantum Science Center
The Department of Energy has renewed funding for the Quantum Science Center, with Los Alamos National Laboratory continuing to play a vital role along with Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the center’s mission to advance quantum science and technology. The center will be funded for $125 million over five years to focus on quantum-accelerated high-performance computing.
North Hollywood Senior High School Wins 5th Place at National Science Bowl
Washington, D.C. (May 4, 2026) – North Hollywood Senior High School tied for 5th place at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science National Science Bowl® academic competition in Washington, D.C., delivering a standout performance on the national stage on Monday, May 4, 2026. The team proudly represented Los Angeles and showed their teamwork […]
Fermilab storage infrastructure enables AI-driven scientific and research discovery for DOE’s Genesis Mission
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission is building a new era of AI-driven scientific discovery — and it requires far more than powerful supercomputers to succeed. To support this national effort, Fermilab’s Fermi Data Platform is providing secure, large-scale data infrastructure needed to make advanced AI research possible across the American Science Cloud.
Indo-Pacific Energy Security Ministerial and Business Forum - U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Japan
Global Issues Indo-Pacific Energy Security Ministerial and Business Forum The Indo-Pacific Energy Security Ministerial and Business Forum will take place March 14-15, 2026 in Tokyo. IPEM is a premier, high-level platform for announcing and advancing energy deals, partnerships and investments that strengthen regional integration and secure critical supply chains across the Indo-Pacific. IPEM is co-hosted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan and the National Energy Dominance Council of the United States. It is sponsored by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency in partnership with the U.S. Departments of State, Interior, Energy, and Commerce, as well as the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). IPEM Forum main page Mission Japan Press Release Feb. 24, 2026 Announcement from the Department of Energy Submit your proposal to join senior government leaders and industry executives shaping the future of global energy security.
Department of Energy's New AI-for-Science ‘Genesis Mission’ Awards Funding to 5 UT Research Projects
Five UT teams have been awarded funding from the DOE’s Genesis Mission, an initiative working to harness artificial intelligence for advances in energy dominance, discovery science and national security.
Q&A: Expert discusses AI, automation drive autonomous science origin in scientific research
Rob Moore is a recognized leader in the development of autonomous science and self-driving laboratories at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). A Tennessee native who ...
NYU Faculty Drive Three US Department of Energy Genesis Mission Projects to Accelerate AI-Driven Discovery
Faculty across Arts and Science, Courant, and Tandon will help develop AI tools for quantum computing, decentralized scientific reasoning, and automated hypothesis generation
State officials alert urgent health hazard at popular CT lake, warn swimmers to stay out of water
Officials with the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection have issued an urgent health hazard for Great Hill Pond in Portland after dangerous bacteria was found in the water.
Two Argonne scientists receive 2025 DOE Early Career Research Awards
Two Argonne scientists, David Kaphan and Yong Zhao, have been named to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program for separate projects in catalysis and nuclear physics.
Energy Department Announces Members of the Office of Science Advisory Committee, Strengthening Gold Standard Science in America
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the chair and members of the newly established Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC), a unified advisory body that will provide independent advice on complex scientific and technical challenges across the Department’s Office of Science.
House Oversight to investigate missing or dead US nuclear scientists
Comer said the panel plans to seek information and briefings from the Pentagon, FBI, Department of Energy and NASA.
Rice joins Department of Energy’s Quantum Science Center to Advance QEC Research
Rice University joins the DOE Quantum Science Center to research quantum error correction methods for future fault-tolerant quantum computing systems.
Magnetic in her field: Earth sciences professor Sarah Slotznik receives early career award
Slotznik received the American Geophysical Union’s Takesi Nagata Early Career Award one year after receiving a $900,000 grant from the Department of Energy to study magnetism.
Argonne-Led Campaign Aims to Improve Midwest Storm Predictions
A new U.S. Department of Energy research campaign will deploy advanced instruments from Ames, Iowa, to Chicago, Illinois, to study how differences in land surfaces, from farmland to cities, impact the formation and intensity of energy-disrupting storms. LEMONT, Ill., Oct. 7, 2026 — Every year, destructive storms cause billions of dollars of damage to homes, […]
$1M DOE grant to explore three elements in used nuclear fuel
Supported by $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy University Program, a team of Penn State materials science researchers will investigate how certain elements — samarium, europium and tellurium — behave in molten salt-based nuclear fuel recycling systems.
DOE’s Office of Science is now Accepting Applications for Graduate Student Research Awards
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced today that the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is now accepting applications for the 2026 solicitation 2. Applications are due on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. ET.
Supercharging silicon: ORNL scientists pinpoint new ways to synthesize power source
An international team that included scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering, X-ray diffraction and
DOE Genesis Mission awards will advance AI-driven science
Two Cornell-led research teams have been selected to receive nearly $1.2 million through Phase I of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission.
Blending Fusion Science, AI to Predict DIII-D Tokamak Behavior
Data scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and partner institutions have developed a deployable machine learning (ML) framework that can adaptively predict changes in a magnetic confinement fusion research machine’s hardware. The innovative method, recently published in the journal Machine Learning with Applications, promises to help make the operation of fusion devices more stable and accelerate humanity’s pursuit of a superabundant
Michigan Tech Atmospheric Scientists Linked to Three Research Projects Selected for DOE Genesis Mission
Michigan Technological University researchers are involved in three proposals tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy for consideration under its recently launched Genesis Mission: Transforming Science and Energy with AI. The mission’s goal is to address national science and technology challenges using artificial intelligence.
The Department of Energy looks to create science-specific AI models
And, how IT cuts led to delays in IRS’s processing of paper returns.
$150M in Federal Funds for Beluga-Healy Electrical Intertie
The US Department of Energy awarded $150 million in defense readiness funds for an electrical intertie between Beluga and Healy.
Ohio State researchers to lead national teams exploring science, AI innovation
The Ohio State University continues to build momentum as a national leader in artificial intelligence research and innovation. This week, two teams led by Ohio State researchers joined a $293 million initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science and national sec...
Merchants of Doubt and the attacks on Extreme Event Attribution science
Last week, I attended a meeting at Columbia University on attribution science and climate law, hosted by the Sabin Center. It was a fantastic event, bringing together scientists and legal experts working at the intersection of extreme event attribution and climate law. Subscribe For those unfamiliar with it, extreme event attribution attempts to quantify the contribution of climate change to an extreme event. For example, several groups analyzed the impact of climate change on Hurricane Harvey’s enormous rainfall totals over Houston, Texas and they found that climate change increased rainfall by 15 to 38%. One thing that came up again and again was how terrified fossil-fuel interests are of extreme event attribution science. They are acutely aware that this research could land them in court. And losing those cases would leave them legally liable for billions of dollars in climate damages. Because the legal stakes are so high, the blowback has turned ugly. I spoke with several scientists at the meeting who are facing ongoing harassment over their work. This blowback is a coordinated campaign to make the entire field look suspect. The goal is to create the impression that attribution science is too uncertain, too political, or too conflicted to be useful in court or in public policy. The strategy is not based on actual science or evidence of misconduct, but on the generation of doubt. The new Merchants of Doubt We’ve seen this before. In fact, not that long ago: We only have to go back a year to the Department of Energy (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG) report to see an example of using doubt as the tool to push back against well-established science. This strategy is laid out in an email from a member of the CWG, Dr. Roy Spencer, that was released during litigation over the Climate Working Group process. The key quote is: About all I can hope is that what we write will provide sufficient “reasonable scientific doubt” regarding the science claims in the 2009 TSD [technical support document], based upon almost 2 decades of new science, to call into question the original reasoning for the EPA Administrator’s decision that CO2 presents a threat to human health and welfare. This statement is strong evidence that at least some members of the committee were working to support a particular policy outcome: revoking the Endangerment Finding. The email also explains how they planned to do it: by attempting to generate “reasonable doubt”. This is going to be hard, Spencer implies. Despite falsely claiming that “2 decades of new science” weakens the case, Spencer explicitly acknowledges that the actual peer-reviewed science of climate change overwhelmingly rejects his position: But if the science argument is decided upon by a vote, or by the number of published citations, we lose the science argument. We can go back even further: This CWG email shares unmistakable DNA with the infamous 1969 tobacco memo that declared: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” The tobacco memo also acknowledges the limit of this strategy: Like the CWG, they knew the science was not on their side. Share The new new Merchants of Doubt The people attacking the IPCC chapter on extreme event attribution are the newest iteration of the Merchants of Doubt. Their goal, like all Merchants before them, is to introduce doubt into the process. Because the report is not even out yet, they cannot attack its conclusions. So they are attacking the authors instead. Here is a press release from the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee: In the letter, the Chairmen express concerns about potential conflicts of interest involving members of the Attribution Committee, stating that “publicly available information suggests a troubling pattern” in which committee members are affiliated with nonprofits that support climate accountability lawsuits, “raising the appearance of impropriety and member bias.” To be clear, this is just innuendo. There is no actual evidence of bias. And given the robust process that these reports go through, including multiple lines of peer review, it seems very unlikely that significant bias can survive into the report. When the report comes out, critics will have the opportunity to make legitimate criticisms of the report — if any exist. If none do, however, they’ll still make criticisms, but they’ll be bogus, simply designed to generate doubt. We’ll see. A note to the press: Fix your frame To any journalists reading this: The public debate over extreme event attribution science is not going away. The science is simply too dangerous to fossil-fuel interests for them to stop fighting it. You very well might be assigned to write an article about this area of research in the future. When you do, do not automatically adopt the framing that climate misinformers want you to use. They want you to frame the story around questions like: Are climate scientists trying to put their thumb on the scale to achieve a predetermined, politically motivated result? Are climate scientists improperly letting their politics invade the science of the IPCC? That frame is a trap. Instead, you need to view this through the historical lens of the Merchants of Doubt. How does the ecosystem of doubt operate? Who funds it? What methods do they use to misrepresent science and slime researchers? What scientific results are they trying to keep people from understanding are legitimate? Ultimately, you instead need to focus your article on the generation of doubt as a way to maintain the fossil fuel industry’s social and legal license to keep burning oil, gas, and coal. If you treat the misinformers’ frame as a legitimate, good-faith scientific critique, you are helping them produce doubt. Don’t do it. Don’t be a Merchant of Doubt. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe other stuff The Staying Curious Substack has an interesting post about the different flavors of climate sensitivity. This is crucial information if you want to understand how scientists think about how much warming the Earth will experience. I’d be grateful if you could hit the like button ❤️ below! It helps more people discover these ideas and lets me know what’s connecting with readers.
Dark energy survey scientists release analysis of all six years of survey data
The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration collected information on hundreds of millions of galaxies across the universe using the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the U.S. ...
MSU graduate named Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow
Michigan State University alumnus Aaron Philip (‘26) has been named a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow. He is the second Spartan in university history and one of only 29 students this year to earn the designation.
University of California partners with U.S. Department of Energy to advance energy, discovery and national security through Genesis Mission
UC scientists at seven campuses and three national labs lead 15 percent of DOE-funded projects.
The National Academy of Sciences Elects Two Berkeley Lab Researchers
Two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They are part of a cohort of 120 new members and 25 international members. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — alongside the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations. The 2026 electees bring the total number of active members to 2,705 with 557 international members. Gary Karpen is a biologist senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Biological Systems and Engineering Division and a Professor of Cell and Developmental Physiology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Karpen studies how the structure, organization, and maintenance of genetic material impact inheritance and cell function. His lab focuses on chromatin — a packaged form of DNA strands wrapped around proteins that comprises our chromosomes — with a particular emphasis on centromeres, rarely expressed sequences called heterochromatin, DNA repair, and regulatory RNAs. His research reveals insights into fundamental aspects of nuclear organization and genome regulation that are shared across the tree of life, broadening our understanding of cancer and other diseases, birth defects, and aging. Kam-Biu Luk is a Professor Emeritus of physics at UC Berkeley and a retired senior faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division. He is an experimental particle physicist whose research has focused on neutrinos: nearly massless, electrically neutral elementary particles that can pass through matter virtually undetected. Neutrinos are created during radioactive decay processes, including the fusion process occurring in stars and the fission process that powers nuclear reactors. Luk initiated and co-led the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a project based in China with more than 200 international collaborators. In 2012, the Daya Bay experiment discovered a new form of a phenomenon called “neutrino oscillation” in which neutrinos change from one type to another. For this discovery, Luk and his collaborator Yifan Wang received the 2014 American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields W.K.H. Panofsky Prize for outstanding work in experimental particle physics, and he was also the co-recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize. Luk is currently participating in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) hosted by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which will investigate any potential difference in behavior between neutrinos and antineutrinos that may shed light on the evolution of the universe, especially why antimatter is absent in the present universe. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Scientists discover learning and memory formation in model membranes
A decades-long collaboration between two scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is reshaping how we understand learning.
NASA, Department of Energy to Develop Lunar Surface Reactor by 2030
NASA, along with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), announced Tuesday a renewed commitment to their longstanding partnership to support the research and
What Does the Science of Climate Change Really Look Like?
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three-part series on how the Right should think about environmental and climate policy. Read Chris Barnard on Reclaiming Environmental Policy from the Left. More than a decade ago, the world’s governments negotiated and signed the Paris Climate Agreement, committing to hold global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. In the following years, climate had immense cultural power. Greta Thunberg emerged. Fortune 500 companies established net-zero plans. The U.S. got the Inflation Reduction Act. Then the pendulum swung back. President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, speaking of green energy as a “scam” and carbon footprints as a “hoax” and on all matters of international policy emphasizing bilateral engagement and power over globalism and cooperation. The technology companies that had been at the forefront of net-zero pledges and green leadership discovered the importance of all-of-the-above power to their visions for artificial intelligence and began quietly postponing or removing their targets. On the left side of the political spectrum, rising concerns about inflation and cost pushed climate lower down in the stated priorities of voters and stump speeches of politicians. The moment is ripe for a reset on the politics of climate change and for conservatives especially to chart a course that acknowledges and addresses the real challenges in plausible ways. So what should we think about climate change as we enter a post-peak climate era? If it is neither an apocalypse nor a hoax, what will hold up as a durable view of climate change? And how does it project onto the concerns and priorities of the right-of-center’s emerging coalition? New to Commonplace_? Subscribe below to get the magazine in your inbox._ Subscribe A Solid Foundation As the politics and economics of climate careened over the past ten years, the physics carried on regardless. In 2015, the year the Paris Climate Agreement was adopted, the world emitted 41.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. By 2025, emissions had risen only 2.4%, to 42.2 gigatonnes, because falling emissions from land use offset increasing emissions from fossil fuels. But slow growth in annual emissions is not rapid decline, let alone net-zero, so carbon dioxide kept accumulating in the atmosphere, going from 399 to 426 parts per million. Global temperature kept rising too, from about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 average in 2015, to 1.4 degrees above it in 2025. None of this should surprise anyone. Even most prominent skeptics, like the authors of the 2025 report commissioned by the Trump administration’s Department of Energy, accept the basic physics. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere at industrial volumes accumulates and traps heat that would otherwise escape to space. That heat warms the upper ocean and increases temperatures at the surface. Increased ocean heat and melting of land ice cause sea levels to rise. Changes in the climate become noticeable to us as subtle shifts in temperature and precipitation, seasons arriving early or late, changes in the surrounding ecosystem, and weather extremes. The much more meaningful debate is not about whether these things are happening, but about what it all means for human societies. (While it is a proxy measure of overall risk, no one experiences global surface temperature.) This debate invokes at least three interesting questions: how much today’s warming is showing up in regional climate trends, how much more warming we should anticipate, and how extreme weather events can be understood in the context of climate change. Recent scientific advances give us new insights into each of these, but there is still much to learn. This is the context in which the next generation of conservative leaders will be the first to deal with significant climate change as a fact, not a forecast. It will be with them for their entire careers. Our evolving scientific picture of climate change will come from weather and climate records stretching further into the past, new kinds of observations in the present, better modeling tools for the future, and simply more time to observe the emergence of climate signals and their tangible effects on ecosystems and communities in the United States and around the world. The policy landscape will be shaped by not only the impacts of changes in the climate, but also by the ways in which societies respond and by the emergence of new technologies for both altering the trajectory of emissions and adapting to new climate realities. Global climate records now show the fingerprints of warming in different phenomena around much of the world. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, documents warming trends over all land regions, even as natural variability adds substantial variance to local trends. And the highest temperature extremes have become more intense and frequent, almost everywhere, since the 1950s. Scientists are highly confident that these changes are attributable to human influence. But confidence in detecting trends and attributing them to human influence degrades across heavy precipitation events; drought trends are heterogeneous and not attributable to human activity with great confidence. For hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms there is even less confidence in trends or their relationship to climate change. In general, a fair summary of the evidence is that for well-observed phenomena, like surface temperature or heavy rainfall, with a clear relationship to warming, our multidecadal observations are consistent with human influence overcoming natural variability over long time periods and extremes increasing. For regions that are sampled more sparsely, or phenomena with a higher noise-to-signal ratio, we will need to observe them longer to understand the magnitude of the climate signal or improve dynamical understanding using models and observations together. But for Climate For those who can’t wait, we also have new techniques that attempt to understand the role climate change has in influencing particular extreme events. When the climate is changing and disaster strikes, it is natural to ask whether that disaster was somehow “caused” by climate change. For scientists and policymakers acting in good faith, answering that question helps develop a more accurate picture of the problem, how it may be getting worse, and what preparations we should be making to respond to it. It may, at some point, give some weight to how liability is assigned by courts or adaptation funding is distributed by society. But how we ask this question is extremely important. It is easy to get the analysis wrong by discounting the role that meteorology plays. As meteorologist Theodore Shepherd explained in a clear 2016 review of climate attribution methods, “if a weather or climate event is truly extreme in the present climate, then perforce it requires unusual meteorological conditions, which means that climate change is at most a contributing factor.” Share Scientists have two ways to probe climate as a contributing factor, both of which have entered media coverage of extreme weather events. One asks a probabilistic question: How much more likely is a particular event (e.g., a temperature record over a particular area) amid global warming? The answer involves using historical records and computer simulations to estimate the likelihood of such an event in both a changed and a preindustrial climate. The findings are less about the specific event, and more about events of that nature. The other question is: How has the changed climate affected the specific event in question? Here, scientists try to understand what a similar event would have looked like in the preindustrial climate. This is sometimes called the storyline approach, where the story is the specific meteorological details of the event. These methods offer ways to test the intuition of scientists about real weather extremes. In late June and early July of 2021, a persistent high-pressure ridge, or heat dome, set up over the Pacific Northwest and an extraordinary heat wave affected the area from Oregon to British Columbia. For six days, it shattered temperature records across the region and hundreds died from heat-related causes, in an area where such high, and persistently high, temperatures were well outside of experience and many live without air conditioning. Scientists have studied its connection to climate change using multiple approaches. This specific event was created by a rare combination of meteorological factors, a strong high-pressure ridge created the conditions for extreme heat, which occurred on top of higher average temperatures in the region from global warming. Probabilistic analyses showed that climate change increased the likelihood of such an event by at least 8-fold to more than 100-fold. One standout example found that such an event had effectively zero probability of occurring in the preindustrial climate. The enormous range in these assessments reflects how hard it is to estimate probabilities of events at the tail of the historical record. Estimates of the effect on the temperature of the event are more clustered. A recent review paper documents how multiple methodologies have found a positive influence, roughly 1-2 degrees Celsius of an anomaly that exceeded 15 degrees, of climate change on the temperature magnitude of the event. Multiple studies have investigated and found some positive influence of climate change in other extreme events. Attribution studies found climate likely increased the heavy rainfall that accompanied Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and surrounding regions in 2024. The extensive fires that struck Los Angeles in 2025 illustrate how the causal chain can become messy, though. Studies do detect a positive influence of climate on the event’s likelihood, but while climate change likely contributed to underlying aridity, it would not have played a role in the heavy winds or land practices that preceded disaster. These event attribution studies will become more common for extreme, or damaging, weather events. They can be produced quickly, and often are reported before peer review. As the Pacific Northwest heatwave example shows, when multiple methods converge on a positive attribution, the finding should probably carry some weight even if you have to be careful about accepting the results from a single study. I expect that as climate change proceeds and the climate thus departs further from a preindustrial counterfactual, the influence will become more detectable across a variety of extreme events and more easily identified. This will be used to cast blame, but can also be used to inform how communities and society adapt to ongoing change. We May Still Be Surprised One positive development, insofar as less climate change is better, has been that our central estimates for future climate change should probably be revised downward. Mostly, that is because the high-end warmings that scientists regularly analyzed about ten to 20 years ago, driven by high emissions throughout the twenty-first century, now appear to be somewhere between unlikely and impossible. At one time, the upper end of mainstream climate projections extended well into 4 to 6 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of this century, which, models suggest, would have wrought enormous real-world damage. Current energy and policy trends now point toward 2.5 or 3 degrees. Damages and risks are commonly modeled as increasing steeply with more warming, so this is already a better-than-previously-expected outcome for the climate (which is independent of the physical response to emissions). But we should maintain a wide range for plausible outcomes and prepare for the possibility of being surprised. Emissions trajectories are subject to deep uncertainty, the physical climate response is still developing, and whatever change occurs in the climate will then be mediated through unpredictable economic, social, and political institutions. Over the past decade, the pace of warming surprised some keen observers and appeared to accelerate, though not yet outside the range of expectation provided by climate models. The reasons for that apparent acceleration are being actively studied (as was the apparent pause in warming from 1998 to 2012), but no single driver has emerged. Some blame it on the El Niño, variability which would have no bearing on climate. Some think it is a result of factories in East Asia and global shipping fleets cutting aerosol emissions, which in the strongest version of the argument would indicate higher climate sensitivity to carbon-dioxide emissions. Others are more measured, not yet ready to draw solid conclusions as to whether climate projections require revision. We will have to see. Long-Term Thinking Climate change asks us to think over long time scales. But the pace of human-driven warming is compressing a large global change into a century. Changing weather patterns and extreme events are already causing adjustment costs and damages and will do more. Adaptation will help, but it is not free. For some communities, these costs will erode livelihoods and well-being, and may force migration. Are we prepared for large-scale managed retreats in the United States? Thankfully, American wealth, geographical diversity, and moderate climates may leave us better prepared than many around the world. But wealthy countries can still suffer serious disruption from narrowly concentrated costs, even if they appear entirely manageable in aggregate. Readers of Commonplace are familiar with the challenges of rapidly adapting to economic forces. The displacement that came from the China Shock is barely perceptible in aggregate GDP and employment data, but it affected millions of people and those people were far less mobile than economic models tended to assume. Deindustrialization rippled through the nation with enormous effects for not only our economic vitality, but also our national security. The forces surrounding climate change may not be so different; the world gets richer and must accept some diffuse costs. Those may be modest overall, but cause all manner of unpredictable effects with which policymakers must cope. In the case of the China Shock, our faith in a growing pie served us poorly. We’ll need to do better on climate. Leave a comment
West Virginia students shine in regional Science Bowl event
The Science Bowl is a national academic competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy that tests high school and middle school students on their knowledge across all areas of STEM, and winner…
Brown’s National Labs Day spotlights collaboration in AI-enabled science
A daylong conference brought scientists from the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to Brown to explore new collaborations and research pathways for faculty and students.
A Pitt-led team plans to automate quantum computing research with a Department of Energy grant
Part of the Genesis Mission, a national effort to harness AI for scientific discovery, the project could enable new chemistry and materials science.
LANL: Los Alamos To Play Key Role In Renewed Quantum Science Center
The U.S. Department of Energy renewed $125 million in funding over five years for the Quantum Science Center to advance quantum-HPC.
The US wants a stronger battery supply chain. China has a decades-long head start
The Trump administration is attempting to strengthen the U.S. battery supply chain and reduce the country’s dependence on China, but analysts and industry executives say current funding is small compared with what would be needed to substantially challenge China’s dominance, CNBC reports. In August 2026, the Department of Energy awarded $500 million to seven companies […]
Harnessing Abundant Electricity From the Sun—and Other CU Boulder Science Tapped for Genesis Mission
Three CU Boulder-led projects and three collaborative projects selected through the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission. Research will advance artificial intelligence for fusion energy, quantum computing, particle physics and water prediction. Awards recognize CU Boulder's leadership in applying AI to some of the nation's most complex scientific challenges.
A deep dive into climate change
Some policymakers continue to question the science of climate change, despite the growing evidence of significant damage to life on land and in the ocean.Katja Matthes, director of the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany, believes the ongoing attempts to politicise climate science and discredit researchers are hindering international cooperation and public understanding. The ocean provides clear evidence of the extent to which changes are occurring, she says.“We are seeing severe, unprecedented and accelerating changes in the ocean — warming ocean temperatures, acidification and oxygen depletion — that are destabilising the most important system that makes life on this planet possible,” Matthes explains. Visible signs of these changes include the melting of ice sheets in the Arctic and Greenland. Deeper down, the growing frequency of hypoxia — or oxygen-deprived “dead zones”, where marine life can no longer survive — in the Baltic and record-high Mediterranean surface temperatures are indicators of the “dramatic warming” of the ocean, she adds.The ocean, which covers around 70% of the Earth’s surface, acts as a vital carbon sink, absorbing around 30% of the planet’s carbon dioxide (CO2) and 90% of the excess heat. However, the global ocean surface temperature has risen by an average of half a degree Celsius since 1982, according to the EU Copernicus observatory. More significant rises have been recorded in the Mediterranean, Black, Baltic and other shallower seas.Some ocean temperature increases do occur naturally, such as during El Niño events. But sustained rises can trigger extreme weather on land — including droughts, floods and catastrophic storms — while also harming marine ecosystems. Only 10% of marine species have been studied, Matthes notes, “so the consequences might be even more severe than we know.”Fostering European cooperation amid uncertaintyMatthes, who holds a doctorate in meteorology, is a professor of atmospheric physics as well as director of GEOMAR. She serves as one of Kiel’s ambassadors to Science Comes to Town (SCTT), an EU-funded programme that aims to promote science’s role in society and strengthen cross-border collaboration in research, innovation and sustainability. SCTT is hosted by the coastal cities of Kiel, Brest (in France) and Split (in Croatia).The SCTT project also provides a platform for raising awareness and understanding between scientists and the public about major issues, such as climate change. Having worked on both sides of the Atlantic, Matthes is frustrated by recent attempts to erode decades of international climate collaboration and question the credibility of research. Earlier this year, the US administration delivered a major blow to global cooperation by withdrawing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and other global climate organisations, claiming they were “contrary to the interests of the United States.”In addition, a US Department of Energy (DOE) report cast doubt on the latest IPCC climate assessment, which was published in 2024. As a contributing author to the IPCC study, Matthes says the DOE sought to discredit scientists like herself. “Climate change is not a matter of opinion, it really exists and we are witnessing dramatic changes,” she notes. “It’s not climate change as a whole that is being targeted, but scientists and their research.”Other US actions have also hit home for Matthes, who spent three years at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The White House has announced plans to close the facility, a move that was “pretty tough” due to the German scientist’s personal connections with the staff and their reputation for excellence.Changing the narrative on climate changeEurope’s scientific community remains a driving force on climate research and collaboration. As one of the world’s leading marine research institutions, GEOMAR attracts students from more than 50 countries and plays an important role in global observation initiatives that contribute to understanding and protecting the ocean basins. At a European level, GEOMAR works closely with other top marine research facilities, including France’s Ifremer, an SCTT partner in Brest. GEOMAR has also developed innovative and safe strategies for removing unexploded wartime munitions from the seabed, which release toxic substances that pose a danger to humans and the marine environment. Through the Horizon Europe MMinE-SwEEPER project, this knowledge has been transferred to the European level.These initiatives are examples of how local action can have a global impact, Matthes says, and how Europe can strengthen climate research and partnerships. “This is a chance for Europe to step up and work on climate cooperation and agreements,” she notes. “Climate change is an international problem and a real threat, and we need more speed on climate action than we have now.”Matthes believes her fellow scientists need to communicate that climate change is not only a threat, but an opportunity to find solutions. “We need to change our narrative and expand our strategic alliances with those who are willing,” she says, “and luckily there are a lot of willing people and countries.”Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.
Bombshell emails show Trump admin knowningly put forward faulty science to deregulate pollution
Internal communications uncovered in a lawsuit by the Environment Defense Fund show Department of Energy personnel criticized the report.
DOE, NIH, and Biohub Partner to Build Foundational Data for Predictive Biological AI Models
WASHINGTON and SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 9, 2026 — The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Biohub signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to advance the frontier of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biology, deepen our understanding of human health and disease, and accelerate breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology. […]
Real-time X-ray data analysis with DONUT accelerates materials science
What if scientists could get a taste of discovery as soon as their experiment finishes? Thanks to a new machine learning tool called DONUT, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne ...
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe - The new DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys map serves as the foundation for the largest-ever 3D map of the Universe, used to investigate dark energy
The newest DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys map, 13 years in the making, covers three-quarters of the sky and catalogs nearly four billion objects. This treasure trove is available to all and contains stars, galaxies, supernovae, gravitational lenses, and much more. Two NSF NOIRLab facilities contributed data to the map: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Mayall telescope and the NSF Blanco telescope, equipped with the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated DECam.
Farmers and ranchers win on NIETC cancellation
The Department of Energy rolled into Lamar last week and Office of Electricity Assistant Secretary Katie Jereza stood in her neat, green suit in front of a room filled with farmers, ranchers and landowners. The crowd was filled with straw cowboy hats, sweat-stained ball caps, tee shirts and button-down chambray shirts that had seen more […]
The hidden technology that could unlock commercial fusion power
Fusion energy may be one of the most promising clean power sources of the future—but only if scientists can precisely measure the extreme, fast-moving plasmas that make it possible. A new U.S. Department of Energy–sponsored report urges major investment in advanced diagnostic tools—the high-tech “sensors” that track plasma temperature, density, and behavior inside fusion systems. Bringing together 70 experts from universities, national labs, and private industry, the workshop identified seven priority areas ranging from burning plasma to full-scale pilot plants.
EMCBC Leaders Highlight Cleanup Progress, Small Business Opportunities
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Supercomputer illuminates subatomic particle that helps hold matter together
A team of researchers has leveraged a supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to reveal the internal structure of a pion in unprecedented detail. The findings ...
Rice joins Department of Energy’s Quantum Science Center
Rice has joined the U.S. Department of Energy Quantum Science Center.
Stony Brook University Researchers Chosen for DOE Genesis Mission AI-for-Science Awards
July 27, 2026 — Researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University) secured five inaugural awards through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, a national AI-for-science initiative designed to accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen U.S. leadership in innovation, energy and national security. The awards reinforce Stony Brook University’s […]
Operations workforce powers ORNL’s autonomous science future
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DOE and Princeton University extend, strengthen partnership
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Emory receives U.S. Genesis Mission award to speed discovery through AI
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ORNL names Kate Evans associate lab director for biological, environmental systems science
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DOE Announces Science Applications for Quantum Computing
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced the release of Quantum Genesis Priority Applications (QGPAs), a set of eight key scientific utility problems that will guide the Quantum Genesis’s goal of developing fault-tolerant scientifically relevant quantum computers. This effort directly supports the goals outlined in President Trump’s Executive Order Ushering in the Next Frontier of Quantum Innovation and builds on the recommendations made in the Blueprint for DOE Quantum Supercom
SBU Researchers Chosen for DOE Genesis Mission AI Awards
Stony Brook University researchers secured five awards through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a national AI-for-science initiative.
Stony Brook University Researchers Chosen for Landmark DOE Genesis Mission AI-for-Science Awards
More than $2.4M will support collaborations with Brookhaven National Lab and other institutions to address complex science and technology challenges Researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook University) secured five inaugural awards through the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission, a national AI-for-science initiative designed to accelerate scientific
Inside Genesis Mission’s ‘All of Government’ Approach to AI for Science
There are now 20 different government agencies participating in the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission project to advance science and engineering through AI. During the Genesis Mission Summit last week, representatives from the NIH, NASA, NSF, and Department of War discussed what they hope to get out of the project, and the contributions they hope […]
Operations workforce powers ORNL’s autonomous science future
Behind every self-driving laboratory at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a team people most never see. Facilities and Operations workers are building and maintaining the infrastructure that makes autonomous science possible. More than a dozen self-driving labs operate at ORNL, placing the Tennessee national lab among the first research institutions in the world to create this autonomous laboratory model at scale.
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Key Takeaways The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys combined more than 263,000 telescope exposures to make the largest 2D map of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Astronomers can pair the Legacy Surveys map with their own observations to explore our universe and search for rare phenomena. The 2D map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey to measure the universe in 3D and investigate dark energy. Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. Astronomers and citizen scientists can explore the map or combine it with their own observations to better understand our universe. Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics’ biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. The new map builds on earlier versions from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys that have already proved invaluable. To date, more than 1,800 science papers that reference the Legacy Surveys data have been published. “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection for the project, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset released today. It was built by combining 263,407 telescope exposures from three ground-based sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. That was supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission and additional public data. “For our team, these data are fundamental to our investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy,” said Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab. “But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to explore the sky and marvel at its wonders.” Here be galaxies The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally conducted to prepare for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. The Legacy Surveys’ 2D map is essentially a deep photograph of the sky; it records where galaxies and stars appear and how bright they appear. This crucial step enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances, building the largest high-resolution 3D map ever made. Scientists study the way galaxies have clustered at different ages of the universe to track dark energy over time. In April 2026, DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule and with vastly more objects than expected. The early results have shown surprising hints that dark energy’s impact may be weakening over time — a paradigm shift that could potentially shape the predicted fate of our universe. DESI expects to publish improved results using their first five years of data in 2027 and is continuing observations into 2028. DESI was so efficient at observing galaxies, the Legacy Surveys map needed to expand. Early on, “it became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said Schlegel, who also works on DESI. The new Legacy Surveys map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026 and will guide the telescope’s operations over the coming years. Computing the cosmos Merging hundreds of thousands of images taken on 2,285 nights, each with unique atmospheric and telescope conditions, was a massive computational effort. It took about a year to develop the computer code and eight weeks to process all the images at the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. Beyond supporting DESI, the Legacy Surveys will be a foundational reference for the next generation of telescopes. As new observatories like the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (jointly funded by NSF and DOE’s Office of Science) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope come online, researchers can compare their observations with one of the deepest and most comprehensive views of the sky ever assembled. The Legacy Surveys data will also help scientists train artificial intelligence tools to analyze petabytes of astronomical data and accelerate new discoveries. It will be among the datasets used in an astrophysics pilot project within the American Science Cloud, part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences; and the partner institutions. DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and NERSC. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Action! NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory Begins Capturing the Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made
The wait is over: NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, is now capturing the cosmos in unprecedented detail, transforming the way we study the dynamic Universe.
PNNL Researchers to Speak About Genesis Mission at National Science Bowl
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WATCH: Padilla Slams Energy Secretary Wright on Cuts to Science Funding in Proposed Budget, Political Cancellation of California Hydrogen Hub Funding
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, questioned Energy Secretary Chris Wright about President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2027 proposed budget for the Department of Energy and its drastic cuts to science funding. “Your budget cuts the Office of Science’s funding by $1.1 billion. […]
DOE Unveils First Genesis Mission Awards for AI-Driven Science
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Attorney General Tong Sues North Haven Business Owner
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Texas A&M University joins the Genesis Mission to transform science using artificial intelligence
The U.S. Department of Energy announces projects in its unprecedented effort to use AI to accelerate science, harness new energy sources and bolster national security.
Colorado receives $5.8 million in federal weatherization assistance grants
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