06
Apr2016
Scientific and technical information, or STI: It's in OSTI's name. It's in the language of our most recent statutory authority, section 982 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005: "The Secretary, through the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, shall maintain within the Department publicly available collections of scientific and technical information resulting from research, development, demonstration, and commercial applications supported by the Department." A DOE policy directive, DOE Order 241.1B, entitled "Scientific and Technical Information Management," requires DOE offices, contractors, and grantees "to ensure that STI is appropriately managed as part of the DOE mission to enable the advancement of scientific knowledge and technological innovation." As provided in the directive, OSTI spearheads the DOE Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP), a collaboration of STI managers and technical information officers from across the DOE complex responsible for identifying, collecting, disseminating, and preserving the results of DOE-funded research and development (R&D). STI is the heart of OSTI and its mission.
The STI that OSTI makes available is produced and published in a variety of media and formats. OSTI disseminates this STI publicly via a suite of web-based searchable databases featuring basic and advanced search capabilities, including semantic search, customized alerts, results displayed in relevance rank, in-document searching, and downloadable search results. SciTech Connect...
01
Apr2016
The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is working with a researcher in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to register scientific datasets produced by a domain collaboration, a recent blog post has reported.
OSTI offers a service for registering datasets to help increase access to digital data from DOE-funded scientific research. Through the DOE Data ID Service, OSTI assigns persistent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to datasets submitted by DOE and its contractor and grantee researchers and registers the DOIs with DataCite to aid in citation, discovery, retrieval, and reuse. OSTI assigns and registers DOIs for datasets for DOE researchers as a free service to enhance the Department of Energy's management of this important resource.
22
Mar2016
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) researcher Ignace Jarrige shown with the sample used in the magnetic refrigeration experiment. Courtesy BNLFor more than 50 years, scientists around the world have attempted to understand the intriguing phenomena of the Kondo effect. When magnetic impurities are added to non-magnetic host materials, their properties display unexpected, anomalous behavior as a result of the Kondo effect. These dilute magnetic alloys, and their unusual behaviors are important tools for scientific research in topics such as ferromagnetism, superconductivity, and other solid-state phenomena. The Kondo effect provides insight into the electronic properties of a wide variety of materials and opens doors to new discoveries.
23
Feb2016
Hubble Space Telescope Courtesy of NASAJust like magic, shape-memory materials have the ability to be transformed into another shape and then return to their original shape—or in some cases even metamorphose into a third shape before returning to their original shape. This transformation is possible because the crystalline structure of shape-memory alloys allows them to sense and respond to their environment. Shape-memory transformation behavior can now be created by thermal, light, or chemical environments. Shape-memory alloys have been used by the research community for well over a decade to accomplish tasks that were not possible otherwise.
19
Jan2016
The flow of a magnetic property of electrons known as spin current from a magnetic material (blue), to a nonmagnetic material (red). Image courtesy SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryDepartment of Energy (DOE) researchers and their collaborators continued to make significant progress throughout 2015 in the emerging field of spintronics, also known as magnetic electronics. Spintronics could change conventional electronics by using the spin of electrons to store information in solid state devices rather than, or in addition to, the transport of the electrical charge of electrons. This new technology addresses many of the challenges of conventional electronics because it allows for transfer of information from one place to another using much less energy, essentially generating no heat, and requiring little space. The field of spintronics is rapidly advancing and opportunities at the frontiers of spintronics are immense.
