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Roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled just enough to allow photons to escape from the primordial cosmological soup, an opaque cloud consisting of a plasma of electrons and nuclei. As stars and galaxies formed over the next 14 billion years, these ancient photons — the universe’s first light — continued traveling. This relic light is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Soils have the potential to mitigate the effects of climate change.

climate change

A change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long period of time.

Source: NASA Climate Kids Source

Mitigation strategies often rely on soil’s ability to store and stabilize large amounts of carbon for millennia. In fact, soils contain more than twice the carbon present in terrestrial

terrestrial

The geographical and biological features that are associated with the Earth's solid, rocky surface, residing on or resembling the land or terrain found on our planet.

Source: NASA Source

vegetation and atmosphere combined.

One of the best ways to draw attendees to your AMS presentations is to be highlighted on the ARM and ASR websites. If you or one of your team members will present a talk or poster during the 2025 AMS Annual Meeting—and if that presentation is based on your ASR-funded project or uses ARM data

ARM data

Continuous field measurements of atmospheric data collected with Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) instruments at fixed and varying locations worldwide.

Source: Argonne National Laboratory Source

as a key data source—please submit your information by Friday, January 10.

To boost crops more efficiently in the future, the evolutionary past may hold key insights. The way that plants process nutrients has a rich back story — they rely on enzymes that have been evolving for billions of years. However, these enzymes are often loosely understood, leaving potential targets for crop engineering untouched.

Photosynthesis is one of the most efficient natural processes for converting light energy from the sun into chemical energy vital for life on earth. Proteins called photosystems are critical to this process and are responsible for the conversion of light energy to chemical energy.

In September and October, staff from the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility were featured prominently at the Tapia Conference in San Diego, California, and at the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Mathematics of Data Science in Atlanta, Georgia.