NEWS RELEASES

Sandia National Laboratories earned eight honors in the 2025 R&D 100 Awards, including seven technology awards and the program’s Researcher of the Year professional award. 

Each molecule has its own unmistakable tone, but the voices of individual molecules are so faint that traditional infrared spectroscopy can only detect the collective chorus of millions or billions of molecules at once. Now researchers at UC San Diego, led by Shaowei Li, have found a way to hear a single molecule sing, using an approach they call infrared-integrated STM, or IRiSTM.

A team led by researchers at Penn State used a plant-based material to separate and recover dysprosium, a heavy rare earth element used in industrial manufacturing, from other rare earth elements. According to the researchers, the approach is environmentally friendly, more sustainable and efficient than other commercial approaches.

Among the enduring challenges of storing energy—for wind or solar farms, or backup storage for the energy grid or data centers—is batteries that can hold large amounts of electricity for a long time. In addition to having a large capacity—potentially enough to power a neighborhood or small city for days or weeks—ideally these batteries would be safe, affordable and environmentally harmless. With an eye toward meeting those benchmarks, researchers at Case Western Reserve University are developing novel electrolytes—fluids that can conduct ions—for rechargeable flow batteries.

PPPL-led simulations have identified why far more exhaust particles strike the inner divertor target than the outer one in tokamaks, a long-observed phenomenon that previous models couldn’t fully explain. The key is combining cross-field drift effects with core plasma rotation. When researchers added both factors to their simulations, the results finally matched experimental measurements. The finding could improve exhaust system designs for future fusion power plants.

Food scraps, manure and sewage are natural byproducts of the U.S. agricultural industry. They are also rich in biogas, a mixture that contains methane and other valuable chemicals. A team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are developing chemistry that could help capture methane from biogas and separate it from other gases so it can be put to good use.

ORNL researchers are advancing connected and automated vehicle systems to improve merging behavior and traffic flow. By linking real vehicles with immersive traffic simulations, the team is evaluating cooperative driving strategies to support the development of next-generation intelligent transportation systems.

A multi-institutional team of researchers led by Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute has for the first time identified specific patterns of brain chemical activity that predict how quickly individual honey bees learn new associations, offering important insights into the biological basis of learning and decision-making.