Feature Articles

US Department of Energy (DOE) Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar, leaders from DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory (Brookhaven Lab) and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), and elected officials from New York State and Virginia today commemorated the start of the Electron-Ion Collider project.

Joshua Carter is a co-founder and the CEO of Helix BioStructures, a contract research organization serving the pharmaceutical industry in early-phase drug discovery. Since starting Helix Biostructures in 2017, Carter has leveraged the fast-paced, industrial capabilities of NSLS-II to perform x-ray crystallography experiments for his high volume of clients. Through Carter's work at NSLS-II, in addition to other services his company provides, Helix Biostructures has helped the pharmaceutical industry develop and improve therapies for a variety of diseases.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit , many students whose academic year had already been radically transformed also had to rejigger summer plans. Internships they'd expected to be in-person moved to all-virtual formats. For more than 30 students participating in virtual summer programs at Brookhaven Lab, that disruption presented an opportunity--a chance to engage in research related to the virus responsible for the upheaval.

High school summer students at Brookhaven Lab conduct computational studies, explore inhibitor drugs to disrupt COVID viral proteins that help infectious particles escape from cells.

Chemists from DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory will be key partners in a new research effort, dubbed the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE), to be led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, aimed at developing hybrid photoelectrodes for converting sunlight into liquid fuels.

On July 29, 2020 the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory opened a new cryo-electron microscopy center, the Laboratory for BioMolecular Structure (LBMS), with an initial focus on COVID-19-related research.

Measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an atom smasher at Brookhaven Lab, revealed many more three-quark particles than would have been expected by a widely accepted explanation of how quarks come together. The results suggest that quarks in the dense particle soup created at RHIC recombine directly, and may offer new insight into how quarks build up the structure of visible matter in our world.

Researchers are using drones to calibrate a prototype radio telescope at Brookhaven Lab. This work may lead to a much larger radio telescope, which could reveal the nature of dark energy and the universe's accelerated expansion.

A new Quantitative Plant Science Initiative led by Brookhaven Lab aims to decode the functions of genes and their impacts on productivity to guide efforts to develop sustainable bioenergy crops.

Let's wind back the clock and take a look at the lead-up to RHIC's first collisions with these excerpts from the Brookhaven Bulletin. As you'll see, getting a complicated particle collider up and running takes a lot of teamwork and coordinated effort. And it isn't always a straight-line path! Then some reflections from the present and on to the future.