News

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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Congratulations to the Geophysical Laboratory's own Stephen Elardo on receiving NASA's Early Career Fellowship!

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.

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.

Geophysical Laboratory research scientist, Muhtar Ahart, has been awarded an Alan Berman Research Publication Award from the Department of the Navy for 2016.  

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.