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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 325 records · Page 18

Myths of nuclear graphite in World War II, with original translations

We re-examine a common narrative that experimental errors by Walther Bothe in 1941 led Germany to abandon graphite as a reactor moderator during World War II. Using document-based nuclear archaeology, we first show that both American and German scientists used an incorrect carbon scattering cross section, thereby undermining the accuracy of all wartime data, including their conclusions on carbon’s absorption. Moreover, we argue that the availability of exceptionally pure petroleum coke in the United States, rather than any academic breakthrough, decisively enabled their production of nuclear-grade graphite. In contrast, Bothe’s Siemens electrographite had more boron contamination than any graphites considered in Fermi’s experiments, rendering it genuinely impractical as a moderator. By reframing the decision to eschew graphite as a deliberate decision rather than a mere experimental oversight, we believe the German decision was a rational consequence of material constraints and wartime priorities.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A Deep Multimodal Representation Learning Framework for Accurate Molecular Properties Prediction

Drug discovery is a complex and challenging process, requiring the optimization of candidate compounds to identify those with the potential to become safe and effective drugs. Predicting molecular properties is an indispensable step in the drug discovery pipeline. Traditionally, this process is costly and time-intensive, involving multiple rounds of experiments and clinical trials, rendering it impractical for every candidate compound. Deep learning techniques have emerged as a promising approach to drug discovery to reduce the cost and time required to identify novel drugs. However, prevalent research in deep learning models focused on predicting molecular properties has primarily fixated on single-modal models, which utilize a single modality of data, neglecting the potential benefits of combining different data modalities. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MRL-Mol: a deep \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{L}earning framework for accurate \textbf{Mol}ecular properties prediction. MRL-Mol harnesses three data modalities: sequence, graph, and image, augmenting the depth of comprehension. Leveraging a large-scale unlabeled dataset~($\sim$1M unique molecules), we pretrain MRL-Mol to extract inter- and intra-modal information. Our study demonstrates the superior performance of MRL-Mol in predicting molecular properties across six benchmark datasets, including both classification and regression tasks. Notably, MRL-Mol outperforms other state-of-the-art molecular properties prediction models. These findings suggest that by combining information from multiple data modalities, MRL-Mol can comprehend molecules better than single-modal deep learning models and identify molecular properties with better accuracy.

Yang, Yuxin↗

Semantic Stealth: Crafting Covert Adversarial Patches for Sentiment Classifiers Using Large Language Models

Deep learning models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which perturbations to their inputs cause the model to produce incorrect predictions. As opposed to adversarial attacks in computer vision, where small changes introduced to pixel values can drastically alter a model's output while remaining imperceptible to humans, text-based attacks are difficult to conceal due to the discrete nature of tokens. Consequently, unconstrained gradient-based attacks often produce adversarial examples that lack semantic meaning, rendering them detectable through visual inspection or perplexity filters. In contrast to methods that rely on gradient-based optimization in the embedding space, we propose an approach that leverages a Large Language Model's ability to generate grammatically correct and semantically meaningful text to craft adversarial patches that seamlessly blend in with the original input text. These patches can be used to alter the behavior of a target model, such as a text classifier. Since our approach does not rely on gradient backpropagation, it only requires access to the target model's confidence scores, making it a grey-box attack. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using open-source LLMs, including Intel's Neural Chat, Llama2, and Mistral-Instruct, to generate adversarial patches capable of altering the predictions of a distilBERT model fine-tuned on the IMDB reviews dataset for sentiment classification.

Roa Carvajal, Maria↗

CaliQEC: In-situ Qubit Calibration for Surface Code Quantum Error Correction

Quantum Error Correction (QEC) is essential for fault-tolerant, large-scale quantum computation. However, error drift in qubits undermines QEC performance during long computations, necessitating frequent calibration. Conventional calibration methods disrupt quantum states, requiring system downtime and rendering in situ calibration impractical. To address this challenge, we propose QECali, a novel framework that enables in situ calibration for surface codes. Our evaluation demonstrates that QECali introduces modest qubit overhead and negligible increases in execution time, offering the first practical solution for in situ calibration in surface code based quantum computation.

Fang, Xiang [University of California, Santa Barba↗

Inactive Overhang in Silicon Anodes

Li-ion batteries contain excess anode area to improve manufacturability and prevent Li plating. These overhang areas in graphite electrodes are active but experience decreased Li + flux during cycling. Over time, the overhang and the anode portions directly opposite to the cathode can exchange Li + , driven by differences in local electrical potential across the electrode, which artificially inflates or decreases the measured cell capacity. Here, we show that lithiation of the overhang is less likely to happen in silicon anodes paired with layered oxide cathodes. The large voltage hysteresis of silicon creates a lower driving force for Li + exchange as lithium ions transit into the overhang, rendering this exchange highly inefficient. For crystalline Si particles, Li + storage at the overhang is prohibitive, because the low potential required for the initial lithiation can act as thermodynamic barrier for this exchange. We use micro-Raman spectroscopy to demonstrate that crystalline Si particles at the overhang are never lithiated even after cell storage at 45 °C for four months. Because the anode overhang can affect the forecasting of cell life, cells using silicon anodes may require different methodologies for life estimation compared to those used for traditional graphite-based Li-ion batteries.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

IPyOverlay

IPyOverlay is a Python library that provides several IPyWidget components for use within the Jupyter software ecosystem. These components add novel UI capabilities to enable details-on-demand interaction paradigms by providing the ability to render widgets on top of other widgets with arbitrary and controllable positioning. This capability enables adding click-and-draggable overlay windows containing other widgets, right-click context menus, and more complex tooltip functionality.

Martindale, Nathan [Oak Ridge National Laboratory ↗

Machine learning and TDDFT software for stopping power computation

(SF-24-012) Stopping power describes the rate that a material slows radiation particles passing through it and is useful in designing many technologies. Few organizations can perform new measurements, which require significant resources and rare equipment, and all others rely on coarse approximations rendered from pre-existing data. Methods for computing stopping power in new materials, such as time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT), have only recently (circa-2015) become available but are too computationally costly to use frequently enough to have a pronounced impact. We have created a method that opens a pathway to computing stopping power without any need for experimental data by combining electronic structure computations and machine learning.

Ward, Logan↗

Faraday: A High-temperature Electrolysis Data Explorer

Faraday is a high-temperature electrolysis data visualization tool, which reveals the performance of various button cells under test conditions. These tests and the resulting analytics on their data constitute a state of the industry as the US Department of Energy pushes for the production of hydrogen. Faraday leverages the Idaho National Laboratory's DeepLynx data warehouse to standardize and query button cell data. Faraday programmatically accesses this data in DeepLynx by traversing the schema, represented by a custom ontology. The user interface queries DeepLynx for timeseries data associated with specific button cells in the warehouse, and renders them using JavaScript charts. Additional charting and data analysis techniques are made possible by an auxiliary Python server.

Woodruff, Nathan↗

PV Generation and Load Forecasting for Adjuntas PR Community Microgrids

Existing frameworks to forecast time-series photovoltaic (PV) output power and consumer load for microgrid operations and controls assume a near-continuous availability of real-time input features from the field assets such as PV inverters, energy meters, and weather station. These incoming data points are used to periodically retrain models and update forecast snapshots over a moving horizon window, be it one hour-ahead, one-day ahead, or one-week ahead. However, such frameworks are not resilient to disruptions in data availability caused by losses in communications between the field sensors and data loggers. Hence, there is a need for programs that assume no availability of real-time microgrid asset data and still make reliable forecasts that can be used for decision-making. Such programs would be apt to function in extreme weather events such as hurricanes and would use lightweight recursive time-series models to independently forecast solar irradiance and ambient temperature, then compute PV power from those forecasts, as well as independently forecast consumer load. The codebase performs forecasting for the scenario of when the microgrid does not have a reliable access to forecasts or real-time observations of solar irradiance (I) and ambient temperature (AT) and load (Load) to be able to adequately forecast, in real-time, the PV power production or a business' load. In this case, using historical values of PV power and load, a univariate forecasting of generation and consumption are respectively made. The use-case in particular has two sub-scenarios: one, a normal 7-day ahead forecast where the unavailability of real-time data is assumed due to infrastructure issues such as loss of communication or sensor maintenance or service downtimes. Whereas a hurricane-caused unavailability of real-time data requires a second model trained specifically on historical hurricane days to be able to capture the extreme day behavior of generation in particular, and load if applicable. A gradient boosted regression tree comprises an ensemble of additive models that map between the input of historical values (be it irradiance, temperature, or load) and their corresponding output forecasts of a given horizon such that the individual learner predictions are summed up over the total number of such learners in the ensemble to produce an aggregate forecast. A weighting mechanism is applied to the training data in each iteration, where actual and forecast values are compared to penalize incorrect forecasts by increasing the weight and reducing it to reward correct forecasts. The code's benefits are that it: (a) accounts for a contingency where communication loss renders newly measured real-time data unavailable for model tuning and snapshot updates; (b) presents blind forecasting that recursively determines the next time-step value in a horizon using the forecast of the same attribute from a prior step; and (c) employs lightweight models that, once trained, can reliably generalize for different horizons, which make them suitable for enhancing the resilience of field microgrids prone to extreme events that encounter disruptions to data availability.

Sundararajan, Aditya [Oak Ridge National Laborator↗

NOODLES Grid [SWR-25-93]

NOODLES Grid is a real-time visualization server for power system simulation data. It loads precomputed datasets, builds optimized instance renderings, and streams live interactive scenes to connected clients. It is built for high scalability, flexible visualization, and fast interaction. NOODLES is a cross-platform/device/tool protocol for collaborative visualization. NOODLES was Developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as a capability of the Insight Center https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/insight-center.html

Brunhart-Lupo, Nicholas [National Renewable Energy↗

Tusqh

SAND2025-00675O Tusqh is a software tool that generates cubical meshes in 2D and 3D and computes the homology of these meshes using persistent homology. It includes a grid cell in the output if its volume-fraction is above a selectable threshold, estimated by sampling points within the cell. Tusqh incorporates anti-aliasing algorithms to mitigate grid orientation and scale effects. It is designed for creating finite element meshes for simulations and can be used in various applications such as heat diffusion, mechanical simulations, and computer graphics rendering. The software outputs meshes in an open format compatible with downstream software. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

SciDAC↗

Pulse: An Outlier Sensitive Downsampling Algorithm For Timeseries Data

Pulse is a downsampling algorithm for timeseries data. Frequently datasets become so large that visualization tools and web browsers cannot effectively render graphics due to memory constraints. Downsampling algorithms are commonly applied to minimize the quantity of data required to visualize important features or trends in the data, but some datasets are composed by distinct enough features and trends that most existing downsampling algorithms fail to preserve them. Pule was developed to downsample timeseries data for galvanostatic stack test data at the Idaho National Laboratory. These datasets were composed by approximately 4 million records, most of them being extremely uniform. However, during relatively brief time periods when the stack test changes state, for example when the test article is powered on, or a load is added, the data produce sparse asymptotes. No existing downsampling algorithm was capable of preserving the sparse asymptotes in electrolysis stack test data. Instead, we develop a downsampling algorithm that preserves important outliers in data, and otherwise aggressively downsamples uniform data. The algorithm has applications in other domains like seismology, in the measurement of earthquakes, or astronomy, in the measurement of quasars or transit photometry.

Woodruff, Nathan [Idaho National Laboratory (INL),↗

Polarized Deep-Inelastic Scattering with Spin Correlations in Herwig 7

This repository is the research software and reproducibility companion for the HerwigPol polarized deep-inelastic scattering implementation developed for Herwig 7. It brings together the modified Herwig and ThePEG source snapshots, the curated POLDIS fixed-order reference code, the custom Rivet analyses, the DIS validation workflow, and the paper source in a single formal repository layout. The repository is intended to preserve the source-level ingredients needed to rebuild and re-run the validated DIS studies. It therefore tracks code, input cards, workflow drivers, and technical notes, while intentionally excluding generated artifacts such as build products, campaign outputs, merged YODA files, plots, and rendered paper outputs.

Papaefstathioou, Andreas [Kennesaw State Universit↗

PRISMA: PARALLEL REFINEMENT AND INTEGRATION SYSTEM FOR MULTI-AZIMUTHAL ANALYSIS

The Parallel Refinement and Integration System for Multi-azimuthal Analysis (PRISMA, version 1.1.0) is a Python application for processing X-ray diffraction (XRD) image data. PRISMA wraps GSAS-II to perform azimuthally-binned peak refinement, computes per-frame strain and d-spacing from those fits, and provides three PyQt5 graphical interfaces: (1) a Recipe Builder for selecting GSAS-II control (.imctrl) files, optional mask (.immask) files or threshold-ased masking, reference and experiment image sets, peaks, zimuthal range and bin size, and an optional ceria-based auto-calibration; (2) a Batch Processor that uses Dask on local workstations and pure MPI (mpi4py.futures.MPICommExecutor) on HPC to distribute GSAS-II refinement across cores or compute nodes and write results to a 4-dimensional (peaks x frames x azimuths x measurements) Zarr dataset; and (3) a Data Analyzer that renders heatmaps of fit parameters, strain, frame-to-frame deltas, and percent-change-vs-reference, and exports user-defined subsections to CSV or Excel. The peak-refinement algorithm is deterministic. Benchmark on ALCF Crux: a 20,000-image set, single-peak fit in frame mode with 44 azimuthal bins on 128 nodes x 128 workers, 48 seconds total wall time.

Lorenzo Martin, Maria De La Cinta [Argonne Nationa↗

lumicap v0.1

Automated HDR luminance imaging system designed for daylighting research and building science. It controls a fisheye-lens camera to capture time-lapse bracket sequences, merges them into calibrated HDR images, and runs a full post-processing pipeline — all unattended. Features: - Scheduled LDR bracket capture via gphoto2 - HDR merging with vignetting, ND filter, and fisheye projection corrections - Illuminance and luminance meter integration (Konica Minolta T-10A, LS-100/150) - Daylight glare probability (DGP) and solar position computation - Automated false-color rendering, JPEG thumbnails, and daily time-lapse video - CSV data logging per timestep Uses: - Long-term monitoring of daylight conditions in buildings - Glare analysis for occupant comfort research - Solar irradiance and sky luminance studies Advantages: - End-to-end automation — capture, calibration, analysis, and archiving run without manual intervention - Built on the proven Radiance toolchain, ensuring photometrically accurate HDR output - Hardware-agnostic meter support via serial auto-detection - Lightweight — no GUI overhead, deployable on a headless Raspberry Pi or similar embedded system

Wang, Taoning [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborato↗

Inhibition of the eukaryotic initiation factor-2α kinase PERK decreases risk of autoimmune diabetes in mice

Preventing the onset of autoimmune type 1 diabetes (T1D) is feasible through pharmacological interventions that target molecular stress–responsive mechanisms. Cellular stresses, such as nutrient deficiency, viral infection, or unfolded proteins, trigger the integrated stress response (ISR), which curtails protein synthesis by phosphorylating eukaryotic translation initiation factor-2α (eIF2α). In T1D, maladaptive unfolded protein response (UPR) in insulin-producing β cells renders these cells susceptible to autoimmunity. We found that inhibition of the eIF2α kinase PKR-like ER kinase (PERK), a common component of the UPR and ISR, reversed the mRNA translation block in stressed human islets and delayed the onset of diabetes, reduced islet inflammation, and preserved β cell mass in T1D-susceptible mice. Single-cell RNA-Seq of islets from PERK-inhibited mice showed reductions in the UPR and PERK signaling pathways and alterations in antigen-processing and presentation pathways in β cells. Spatial proteomics of islets from these mice showed an increase in the immune checkpoint protein programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) in β cells. Golgi membrane protein 1, whose levels increased following PERK inhibition in human islets and EndoC-βH1 human β cells, interacted with and stabilized PD-L1. Collectively, our studies show that PERK activity enhances β cell immunogenicity and that inhibition of PERK may offer a strategy for preventing or delaying the development of T1D.

Research & Experimental Medicine↗

Spectroelectrochemical insights into the intrinsic nature of lead halide perovskites

Abstract Lead halide perovskites have emerged as a new class of semiconductor materials with exceptional optoelectronic properties, sparking significant research interest in photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes. However, achieving long-term operational stability remains a critical hurdle. The soft, ionic nature of the halide perovskite lattice renders them vulnerable to various instabilities. These instabilities can be triggered by factors such as photoexcitation, electrical bias, and the surrounding electrolyte/solvent or atmosphere under operating conditions. Spectroelectrochemistry offers a powerful approach to bridge the gap between electrochemistry and photochemistry (or spectroscopy), by providing a comprehensive understanding of the band structure and excited-state dynamics of halide perovskites. This review summarizes recent advances that highlight the fundamental principles, the electronic band structure of halide perovskite materials, and the photoelectrochemical phenomena observed upon photo- and electro-chemical charge injections. Further, we discuss halide instability, encompassing halide oxidation, vacancy formation, ion migration, degradation, and sequential expulsion under electrical bias. Spectroelectrochemical studies that provide a deeper understanding of interfacial processes and halide mobility can pave the way for the design of more robust perovskites, accelerating future research and development efforts. Graphical Abstract

Min, Seonhong↗

Freestanding VO 2 membranes on epidermal nanomesh for ultra-sensitive correlated breathable sensors

The interest in highly sensitive sensors is rapidly increasing for detecting very tiny signals for Internet of Things devices. Here, we achieve ultra-sensitive correlated breathable sensors based on freestanding VO 2 membranes. We fabricate the membranes by growing VO 2 films onto sacrificial Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 layer grown on SrTiO 3 , selectively dissolving the Sr 3 Al 2 O 6 in water, and then rendering freestanding VO 2 membrane on nanomesh. The nanomeshes are extremely flexible, sweat permeable, and readily skin-adhesive. The resistance of the VO 2 membranes is reversibly tuned by human’s tiny mechanical stimuli and breath stimuli. The stimuli modulate the Peierls dimerization of one-dimensional V-V chains in the VO 2 lattice which concomitantly controls the electron correlation and hence resistivity. Since our breathable sensors operate based on quantum-mechanical correlation effects, their sensitivity is 1-2 orders of magnitude higher than conventional tactile and respiratory sensors based on other materials. Thus, the freestanding membranes of correlated oxides on epidermal nanomeshes are multifunctional platforms for developing ultra-sensitive correlated breathable sensors.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗