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(PhysOrg.com) -- When most of us think of an atom, we think of tiny electrons whizzing around a stationary, dense nucleus composed of protons and neutrons, collectively known as nucleons. A collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne and Thomas Jefferson National Laboratories has demonstrated just how different reality is from our simple picture, showing that a quarter of the nucleons in a dense nucleus exceed 25 percent of the speed of light, turning the picture of a static nucleus on its head.

As a first line of defense, steel barrels buried deep underground are designed to keep dangerous plutonium waste from seeping into the soil and surrounding bedrock, and, eventually, contaminating the groundwater. But after several thousand years, those barrels will naturally begin to disintegrate due to corrosion. A team of scientists at Argonne National Lab (ANL) in Argonne, Ill., has determined what may happen to this toxic waste once its container disappears.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Converting sunlight into electricity is not economically attractive because of the high cost of solar cells, but a recent, purely optical approach to improving luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) may ease the problem, according to researchers at Argonne National Laboratories and Penn State.

An advanced material that could help bring about next-generation "spintronic" computers has revealed one of its fundamental secrets to a team of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Perhaps one of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest paintings has never been reprinted in books of his art. Known as the "Battle of Anghiari," it was abandoned and then lost—until a determined Italian engineer gave the art world hope that it still existed, and a physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory developed a technique that may reveal it to the world once again.

Cataloguing underground waterways, some of which extend for thousands of miles, has always been difficult—but scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, with colleagues from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the International Atomic Energy Agency, are mapping them with some unusual equipment: lasers and a rare isotope.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Alexey Snezhko and Igor Aronson, physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, have coaxed "micro-robots" to do their bidding.

It's not profits or the end of coal (they're pretty confident about both those things). Rather, it's a dwindling resource that you wouldn't expect. There are endless aspects of our energy economy to think about--including an aging power grid infrastructure, the lack of rare earth metals , the need to build more robust transmission lines, and so on

(PhysOrg.com) -- Radioactive dating is used to determine everything from the age of dinosaur fossils to Native American arrowheads. A new technique recently developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory may give researchers another tool for radioactive dating that could be of particular use in studying the history of climate change.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In a new report, scientists from the University of Rochester, Cornell University, and the Brookhaven and Argonne national laboratories carrying out research at national laboratories including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source at Argonne describe phase retrieval methods to measure wavefront aberrations produced by imperfect hard x-ray optics.