Home » News » In The News

In The News

  • PhysOrg details Gschneidner's Acta Materialia award

    PhysOrg.com ran a feature about Ames Lab senior metallurgist Karl Gschneidner's selection for the 2014 Acta Materialia Materials and Society Award. The award honors scientists who have made a major positive impact on society through materials science.

    Link to Article
     
  • Purdue joins CMI

    Purdue University issued a news release detailing Purdue's involvement in the Critical Materials Institute, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Innovation Hubs, located and led by the DOE's Ames Laboratory.

    Link to Article
     
  • The global metals war taking place in Iowa

    CNBC reporter Eric Rosenbaum talks with Ames Laboratory researchers Karl Gschneidner and Bill McCallum on the scarcity of rare-earth metals and what the Critical Materials Institute hopes to do about the problem, including finding substitute materials and using more plentiful cerium in place of dysprosium.

    Link to Article
     
  • Iowa State, Ames Lab chemists help find binding site of protein that allows plant growth

    Iowa State University News Service issued a news release on work by a team ISU and Ames Laboratory researchers that discovered where a protein binds to plant cell walls, a process that makes it possible for plants to grow. Researchers say the discovery could one day lead to bigger harvests of biomass for renewable energy. The findings have just been published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

    Link to Article
     
  • Magnetics Magazine carries story on magnet alternative research

    Magnetics Magazine carried a press release on work by Ames Laboratory's Matt Kramer to develop a new material based on manganese as a rare-earth-free alternative to permanent magnets that contain neodymium and dysprosium. These manganese composite magnets hold the potential to double magnetic strength relative to current magnets while using raw materials, such as iron, cobalt, chrome and nickel that are abundant and less expensive than current permanent-magnet materials.

    Link to Article
     
  • PhysOrg: New quasicrystals discovered

    PhysOrg picked up the news release on a discovery by Ames Lab researchers of a new family quasicrystals. The discovery has been published online by the journal Nature Materials in an article,  “A family of binary magnetic icosahedral quasicrystals based on rare earth and cadmium.”

    The discovery has been published online by the journal Nature Materials in an article, "A family of binary magnetic icosahedral quasicrystals based on rare earth and cadmium."

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-scientists-family-quasicrystals.html#jCp

    The discovery has been published online by the journal Nature Materials in an article, "A family of binary magnetic icosahedral quasicrystals based on rare earth and cadmium."

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-scientists-family-quasicrystals.html#jCp

    Link to Article
     
  • Senate confirms Moniz as Energy Secretary

    The Senate on Thursday confirmed Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Ernest Moniz to be the next Secretary of Energy, replacing Steven Chu. The vote was 97-0, with three senators (Roy Blunt, R-Missouri; Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma; and Jerry Moran, R-Kansas) missing the vote. Moniz has served on the faculty of MIT since 1973, with a research focus on energy technology and policy.

    Link to Article
     
  • King does Q&A with Materials World magazine

    Melanie Rutherford of Materials World talks with Ames Lab Director Alex King about the global rare earth supply challenge, work with a Nobel Prize winner and why he'll always have a preference for chalk. The interview appears in the June 2013 issue.

    A pdf version of the article is available HERE.

    Link to Article
     
  • DOE Launches the Critical Materials Institute, a new Energy Innovation Hub (MRS Bulletin)

    The MRS Bulletin for April carried a story on the establishment of the Critical Materials Institute, DOE's latest Energy Innovation Hub, that's located at the Ames Laboratory.

    Link to Article
     
  • CMI mentioned in U.S. News and World Report article

    U.S. News and World Report writer Jeff Nesbitt mentions the Critical Materials Institute in an article about China's ongoing monopoly of rare earth metals. In the second to last paragraph, Nesbitt writes, "This new DOE-financed organization (the Critical Minerals Institute) will work with dozens of research partners in an effort to find creative ways and methods of inexpensively mining the rare metals. For instance, a mine in California (Mountain Pass) actually has one of the largest rare metal deposits in the world."

    Link to Article