High Pressure
Washington, DC — A group of scientists led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Huiyang Gou and Timothy Strobel performed high-pressure experiments on linear dicyanoacetylene (C4N2) using a diamond anvil cell, in which a pressure-induced reaction process was uncovered. Discrete linear C4N2 molecules were found to polymerize into a disordered extended network without significant change to the bulk composition.
Mineralogy
Washington, DC—Applying big data analysis to mineralogy offers a way to predict minerals missing from those known to science, as well as where to find new deposits, according to a groundbreaking study. In a paper published by American Mineralogist, Geophysical Laboratory scientists Shaunna Morrison and Bob Hazen report the first application to mineralogy of network theory (best known for analysis of e.g. the spread of disease, terrorist networks, or Facebook connections).
High Pressure
The Geophysical Laboratory’s Postdoctoral Associate Zachary Geballe has been honored with Carnegie’s seventh Postdoctoral Innovation and Excellence (PIE) Award. These prizes are made through nominations from the departments and are chosen by the Office of the President.
Matter at Extreme States
Washington, DC--Experimental petrologist Michael Walter, currently head of the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, has been selected as the eighth director of Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory.  He will begin his directorship on April 1, 2018.  
Materials
Washington, DC— A team including several Geophysical Laboratory scientists has developed a form of ultrastrong, lightweight carbon that is also elastic and electrically conductive. A material with such a unique combination of properties could serve a wide variety of applications from aerospace engineering to military armor.
Geochemistry
The Fellowship was awarded, "For outstanding contributions to experimental petrology especially to the structures, properties, and elemental partitioning behavior of magmas and fluids at high pressure and temperature, and also for his continuing initiatives to activate the Japanese Geoscience Union and its International Journal, Progress in Earth and Planetary Science (PEPS)”.
Department
On Tuesday, 9 May 2017, the Geophysical Laboratory and DTM employees gathered at the Greenewalt buildilng to present recent results to one another using posters and demonstrations for the Third Annual Broad Branch Road Poster Session!
Matter at Extreme States
Washington, DC— A team led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Yingwei Fei, a experimental petrologist, and Cheng Xu, a field geologist from Peking University, has discovered that a rare sample of the mineral majorite originated at least 235 miles below Earth’s surface.
Department
Carnegie Science believes that the March for Science is the perfect opportunity to showcase the connections between scientific discovery, technology, economic strength, global security, human and animal health, and the condition of our planet.  We fully support the official March for Science mission, which “champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity.”
Materials
Washington, DC—It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of silicon when it comes to computing, solar energy, and other technological applications. (Not to mention the fact that it makes up an awful lot of the Earth’s crust.) Yet there is still so much to learn about how to harness the capabilities of element number 14.
High Pressure
Washington, DC—Hydrogen is both the simplest and the most-abundant element in the universe, so studying it can teach scientists about the essence of matter. And yet there are still many hydrogen secrets to unlock, including how best to force it into a superconductive, metallic state with no electrical resistance.
High Pressure
Washington, DC— New work from a team including the Geophysical Laboratory's Guoyin Shen and Yoshio Kono used high pressure and temperature to reveal a kind of “structural memory” in samples of the metal bismuth, a discovery with great electrical engineering potential.
Mineralogy
Washington, DC—Human industry and ingenuity has done more to diversify and distribute minerals on Earth than any development since the rise of oxygen over 2.2 billion years ago, experts say in a paper published today. The work bolsters the scientific argument to officially designate a new geological time interval distinguished by the pervasive impact of human activities: the Anthropocene Epoch.
Planetary Science
Washington, DC—New work from the Geophysical Laboratory’s Stephen Elardo and Anat Shahar shows that interactions between iron and nickel under the extreme pressures and temperatures similar to a planetary interior can help scientists understand the period in our Solar System’s youth when planets were forming and their cores were created. Their findings are published by Nature Geoscience.
High Pressure
Washington, DC—In Earth’s interior, water (H2O) plays an important role in rock physics, but geoscientists rarely treat water in its constituent forms, that is as hydrogen plus oxygen. New work from a team led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Dave Mao has identified that hydrogen can escape from the water under conditions found in Earth’s lower mantle leading to a new paradigm in lower mantle chemistry. Their results were published in Proceeding of the National Academic Science, U.S.A.
High Pressure
Washington, DC— Although helium is the second most-abundant element (after hydrogen) in the universe, it doesn’t play well with others. It is a member of a family of seven elements called the noble gases, which are called that because of their chemical aloofness—they don’t easily form compounds with other elements. Helium, widely believed to be the most inert element, has no stable compounds under normal conditions. 
High Pressure
Yingwei Fei, a high-pressure experimentalist at the Geophysical Laboratory, and Peter Driscoll, a theoretical geophysicist at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, have been awarded a Carnegie Science Venture Grant for their project “Direct Shock Compression of Pre-synthesized Mantle Mineral to Super-Earth Interior Conditions.”
High Pressure
Washington, DC— Phase transitions surround us—for instance, liquid water changes to ice when frozen and to steam when boiled. Now, researchers at the Geophysical Laboratory have discovered a new phenomenon of so-called metastability in a liquid phase. A metastable liquid is not quite stable. This state is common in supercooled liquids, which are liquids that cool below the freezing point without turning into a solid or a crystal.
Materials
Washington, DC—Germanium may not be a household name like silicon, its group-mate on the periodic table, but it has great potential for use in next-generation electronics and energy technology. Of particular interest are forms of germanium that can be synthesized in the lab under extreme pressure conditions. However, one of the most-promising forms of germanium for practical applications, called ST12, has only been created in tiny sample sizes—too small to definitively confirm its properties.
Geochemistry
The AGU Fall Meeting 2016 will take place in San Francisco, CA from December 12-17.  Many staff members and postdoctoral associates from the Geophysical Laboratory will attend this year.   Check here daily for live updates on each day's science presentations; or follow along on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. For a live stream of conference photos, click here or follow along below!
Materials
The Geophysical Laboratory's Postdoctoral Fellow Shi Liu was awarded the 2017 APS Metropolis Award in late October.  The purpose of the award is to recognize doctoral thesis research of outstanding quality and achievement in computational physics and to encourage effective written and oral presentation of research results.
Department
Despite their beautiful new jerseys, the DTM Dynamos came up a bit short on Friday against their cross-campus rivals, our very own GL Pistons, who defended their title of the coveted MudCup! DTM dominated the first half, earning nearly a dozen corner kicks and one penalty kick.
Geochemistry
The Geophysical Laboratory dedicated two and a half days from October 23-25 celebrating the legacy and vision of Marilyn Fogel, who spent 33 years here as a Staff Scientist doing groundbreaking research and mentoring generations of young scientists of all levels—from high school interns to postdo
High Pressure
Washington, DC— Did you know that there are at least 17 crystalline forms of ice, many of them formed under extreme pressures, such as those found in the interiors of frozen planets? New work from a team led by Carnegie’s Timothy Strobel has identified the structure of a new type of ice crystal that resembles the mineral quartz and is stuffed with over five weight percent of energy-rich hydrogen molecules, which is a long-standing Department of Energy goal for hydrogen storage.  
High Pressure
Washington, DC— New work from a team led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Alexander Goncharov has created a new extremely incompressible carbon nitride compound. They say it could be the prototype for a whole new family of superhard materials, due to the unexpected ratio of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Their work is published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.
Department
The Geophysical Laboratory's Anat Shahar and Bob Hazen received the top two awards from the Mineralogical Society of America (MSA) during the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting on 27 September in Denver, CO.  Hazen and Shahar gave outstanding award lectures and join the likes of many GL alumni in each category.  Shahar received the MSA Award and Hazen received the MSA Roebling Medal. Congratulations to both on awards well deserved!
Geochemistry
This story took time… time, extreme pressure and high temperature. It’s a story of complex NH bedrock geology but also remarkable coincidences. It’s the story of a short-lived, nearly forgotten chapter of NH history: graphite mining in the western hills of our State from the White Mountains to the Monadnock Region.
Materials
Washington, DC— For the first time, researchers, including GL's Viktor Struzhkin, have experimentally produced a new class of materials blending hydrogen with sodium that could alter the superconductivity landscape and could be used for hydrogen-fuel cell storage.
Planetary Science
Congratulations to the Geophysical Laboratory's own Stephen Elardo on receiving NASA's Early Career Fellowship!
Department
Congratulations to Geophysical Laboratory/DTM Librarian, Shaun Hardy, who was just selected to receive the 2016 Mary B. Ansari Distinguished Service Award of the Geoscience Information Society!
High Pressure
Washington, DC— Hydrogen is the most-abundant element in the universe. It’s also the simplest—sporting only a single electron in each atom. But that simplicity is deceptive, because there is still so much we have to learn about hydrogen.
Materials
Washington, DC— Using laboratory techniques to mimic the conditions found deep inside the Earth, a team of Geophysical Laboratory scientists led by Ho-Kwang “Dave” Mao has identified a form of iron oxide that they believe could explain seismic and geothermal signatures in the deep mantle. Their work is published in Nature.
High Pressure
Washington, DC— Earth's magnetic field shields us from deadly cosmic radiation, and without it, life as we know it could not exist here. The motion of liquid iron in the planet’s outer core, a phenomenon called a “geodynamo,” generates the field.
Department
Nagoya, Japan, 11 May 2016—Ronald Cohen was an invited speaker at the AMTC5 workshop in Nagoya May 11-13, 2016 and spoke on "Strong Coupling Ferroelectrics, How They Work and How They Can Be Improved."  He then visited ELSI (Earth and Life Sciences Institute) at Tokyo Tech and spoke on “First-principles studies of the deep Earth.”
Department
Geophysical Laboratory research scientist, Muhtar Ahart, has been awarded an Alan Berman Research Publication Award from the Department of the Navy for 2016.  
Department
On May 6, 2016 the Broad Branch Road campus honored eight employees for their years of service at the Geophysical Laboratory.
Geochemistry
Washington, DC—New work from a research team led by the Geophysical Laboratory's Anat Shahar contains some unexpected findings about iron chemistry under high-pressure conditions, such as those likely found in the Earth’s core, where iron predominates and creates our planet’s life-shielding magnetic field.
Materials
Washington, DC, 18 March 2016—Geophysical Laboratory team Tim Strobel, Venkat Bhadram, and alum DuckYoung Kim, has discovered a new transition metal, titanium pernitride, TiN2, which is ultraincompressible (bulk modulus ~360-385GPa) and could be a potential superhard material.
Department
Washington, DC, 29 March 2016—The Deep Carbon Observatory Executive Committee met on 1-2 March 2016 to discuss overarching themes for DCO’s final years—including modeling and visualization, synthesis and integration, field studies, and instrumentation—as well as plans beyond the end of the decadal program in 2019.
Department
Elissaios Stavrou, Geophysical Laboratory (GL) alumni, was appointed to staff member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).  Stavrou was a visiting investigator at GL from 2011-2012 and a postdoctoral associate from 2012-2013.
Department
Hokkaido, Japan, 19 February, 2016—More than 60 scientists from around the world, including many from Carnegie, gathered at the perpetually snowing Rusutsu Ski Resort for the first Solar System Symposium held in western Hokkaido, Japan from Februrary 17-19, 2016. 
Astrobiology
Washington, DC— A team of scientists including Carnegie’s Dina Bower and Andrew Steele weigh in on whether microstructures found in 3.46 billion-year-old samples of a silica-rich rock called chert found in Western Australia are the planet’s oldest fossils.
High Pressure
Washington, DC—If you freeze any liquid fast enough, even liquid metal, it becomes a glass. Vitrified metals, or metallic glasses, are at the frontier of materials science research.
Mineralogy
The Geophysical Laboratory’s own Bob Hazen will be starring in “Life’s a Rocky Start,” a PBS NOVA special on January 13, 2016 at 9pm EST on PBS. 
Department
The AGU Fall Meeting 2015 will take place in San Francisco, CA from December 13-18.  Many staff members and postdoctoral associates from the Geophysical Laboratory will attend this year.  Check here daily for live updates on each day's science presentations.
High Pressure
EFree, a research center at the Geophysical Laboratory, held a Center-wide Neutron Day on December 10, 2015 at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Department
The Geophysical Laboratory's Tim Strobel talks in the November issue of New Scientist about hacking silicon's structure to make it more efficient for use in computer chips and solar panels.
Mineralogy
The Geophysical Laboratory's Anat Shahar and Bob Hazen were announced as the recipients of the Mineralogical Society of America's (MSA) 2016 MSA Award and Roebling Medal, respectively.  They will receive their awards at the MSA meeting in Denver in September 2016.
Department
In August, the Geophysical Laboratory reached a major milestone - the publication of our 5,000th scientific paper!  The first Geophysical Laboratory paper was published in 1905.
Department
Last week, scientists from around the world were all about building a deeper understanding of the nature of biology, including modeling the origins of life on an abstract level starting from prebiotic conditions on Earth and, possibly, on other planets.

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