Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist Elizabeth “Libby” Johnson (1921-1996), one of the world’s first nuclear reactor operators, standardized the field of criticality safety with peers from ORNL and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her work came on the heels of two incidents involving nuclear materials that took the lives of two government researchers at the end of the Manhattan Project.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and their technologies have received seven 2022 R&D 100 Awards, plus special recognition for a battery-related green technology product.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a miniaturized environment to study the ecosystem around poplar tree roots for insights into plant health and soil carbon sequestration.
As climate change leads to larger and more frequent wildfires, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using sensors, drones and machine learning to both prevent fires and reduce their damage to the electric grid. Engineers are honing technology to remotely sense electrical arcing and faulty equipment, as well as the direction of spreading fires.
Story tips: Drought-resistant crops, hydropower, AI for atomic measurement, controlling refrigerants and recycling e-waste
ORNL researchers used two different methods to compile data from the COVID-19 response to give decision-makers an informed perspective on what was going on in locations around the country.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering to find the first 2D system to host a spiral spin liquid.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are tackling a global water challenge with a unique material designed to target not one, but two toxic, heavy metal pollutants for simultaneous removal.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Innovation Crossroads program welcomes six new science and technology innovators from across the United States to its sixth cohort. As the Southeast’s only research and development program for entrepreneurs based at a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, Innovation Crossroads provides unique support to science-based startups to help advance game-changing technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Innovation Crossroads program welcomes six new science and technology innovators from across the United States to its sixth cohort.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, or ASME, selected Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researcher Bryan Maldonado for the 2022 Old Guard Early Career Award. He was recognized for exceptional service to ASME activities including science and engineering student mentorship.
Two Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have been elevated to the grade of senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Robert Wagner, division director for the Building Transportation Science Division, and Scott Curran, group leader for Fuel Science and Engine Technologies Research, earned the recognition for making significant contributions to the engineering field.
Burak Ozpineci, a Corporate Fellow and section head for Vehicle and Mobility Systems Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of six international recipients of the eighth Nagamori Award chosen annually by the Nagamori Foundation based in Kyoto, Japan. The honor recognizes outstanding researchers and engineers working in electric motors, motor drives and related fields.
ORNL Story tips: Split-second leak detection, serendipitous silicon and retrofitting untapped dams
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have definitively linked the function of a specific domain of proteins important in plant-microbe biology to a cancer trigger in humans, knowledge that had eluded scientists for decades.
An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the University of Manchester, has developed a fast and economical method of converting methane, or natural gas, into liquid methanol at ambient temperature and pressure. The method takes place under continuous flow over a photo-catalytic material using visible light to drive the conversion. To help observe how the process works and how selective it is, the researchers used neutron scattering at the VISION instrument at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Spallation Neutron Source.
To solve a long-standing puzzle about how long a neutron can “live” outside an atomic nucleus, physicists entertained a wild but testable theory positing the existence of a right-handed version of our left-handed universe.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an upcycling approach that adds value to discarded plastics for reuse in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. The readily adoptable, scalable method introduces a closed-loop strategy that could globally reduce plastic waste and cut carbon emissions tied to plastic production.
Doug Kothe has been named associate laboratory director for the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, effective June 6.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory discovered that certain bacteria increase the climate resilience of Sphagnum moss, the tiny plant responsible for storing a third of the world’s soil carbon in peat bogs.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Science has selected three Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists for Early Career Research Program awards.
A Quantum Science Center-supported team has captured the first-ever appearance of a previously undetectable quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode.
To optimize biomaterials for reliable, cost-effective paper production, building construction, and biofuel development, researchers often study the structure of plant cells using techniques such as freezing plant samples or placing them in a vacuum. These methods provide valuable data but often cause permanent damage to the samples.
As the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility marks 30 years of collecting continuous measurements of the Earth’s atmosphere this year, the ARM Data Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is shepherding changes to its operations to make the treasure trove of data more easily accessible and useful to scientists studying Earth’s climate around the world.
Four Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are among 22 engineers in North America to receive the annual Sandra L. Bouckley Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award from SME.
A new flagship facility for nuclear physics has opened, and scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a hand in 10 of its first 34 experiments.
ORNL Story tips: Tailor-made molecules, better battery electrolytes, beyond Moore’s Law and improving climate model accuracy
A new capability developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to identify urban neighborhoods, down to the block and building level, that are most vulnerable to climate change could help ensure that mitigation and resilience programs reach the people who need them the most.
Adrian Sabau of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been named an ASM International Fellow.
The Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory earned the top ranking today as the world’s fastest on the 59th TOP500 list, with 1.1 exaflops of performance. The system is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second.
Using neutrons, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory pieced together the molecular mechanics behind a peptide’s ability to deal significant damage to bacterial cells. Their findings could inform new therapeutic strategies for treating bacterial infections where antibiotics have fallen short.
ORNL’s suite of LandScan population distribution models is available online to the global public for the first time ever under a new open-source creative commons license.
For decades, the Department of Energy’s annual Transportation Energy Data Book has tracked trends in U.S. transportation, serving as the definitive guide for industry, policymakers, researchers and consumers. The most recent version is now available online, marking the book’s 40th edition.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are teaching microscopes to drive discoveries with an intuitive algorithm, developed at the lab’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, that could guide breakthroughs in new materials for energy technologies, sensing and computing.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists developed a computational technique that improves the resolution of neutron instruments by 500 percent. This solution comes at virtually no cost since it requires no additional hardware and uses open source software.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers used the nation’s fastest supercomputer to map the molecular vibrations of an important but little-studied uranium compound produced during the nuclear fuel cycle for results that could lead to a cleaner, safer world.
Miaofang Chi, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America, or MSA.
ORNL researchers have developed and tested novel small-molecule antivirals in an effort to design new drugs to treat COVID-19. The so called hybrid inhibitor molecules are made from repurposed drugs used to treat hepatitis C and the original coronavirus outbreak in the early 2000s. The experimental research results show the molecules are similarly as effective as some of the leading drugs on the market today.
ORNL story tips: Fueling up on savings, COVID’s behavior effect, cosmic collisions, seismic and sound, and space-to-ground comms
A team of researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has developed a novel, machine learning–based technique to explore and identify relationships among medical concepts using electronic health record data across multiple healthcare providers.
Stan Wullschleger, associate laboratory director for biological and environmental systems science at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the recipient of the 2022 Commitment to Human Diversity in Ecology Award from the Ecological Society of America, or ESA.
Tackling the climate crisis and achieving an equitable clean energy future are among the biggest challenges of our time. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the largest Department of Energy science and energy laboratory in the country, is deeply invested in the big science capabilities and expertise needed to address the climate challenge on multiple fronts.
Because next-generation biofuels will depend on the growth and hardiness of woody feedstocks, scientists have sought to better understand how leaf cells quickly respond to environmental cues such as light, temperature and water. Scientists at the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, or CBI, have studied rapid molecular changes in leaves from poplar trees during normal daily cycles of daylight and darkness. Until now, the effect of these modifications at the cellular protein level was not well understood, partly because of the technical limitations of the analytical tools available.
Researchers from Sandia, ORNL, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville used neutron scattering and additional experimental techniques to study a series of materials called metal organic frameworks (MOFs) made from the entire list of rare earth elements. The researchers established a comprehensive approach to evaluating large numbers of MOFs and also made an important discovery about a defect that can be useful in building technologies to mitigate toxic gases such as nitrogen and sulfur dioxides.
At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, biogeochemist Elizabeth Herndon is working with colleagues to investigate a piece of the global carbon cycle puzzle that has received little attention thus far: the role of manganese in soils.
ORNL story tips: Supply chain crunch, safer batteries on impact and lithium light bright
A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory team leveraged an IBM Q quantum computer through the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to capture part of a calculation of two protons colliding. The calculation can show the probability that an outgoing particle will emit additional particles.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists used protoplast fusion to create genetically diverse Bacillus organisms to aid in genome mapping, which advances the engineering of microbes for efficient biofuel processing.
The rapid pace of global climate change has added urgency to developing technologies that reduce the carbon footprint of transportation technologies, especially in sectors that are difficult to electrify. In response, researchers collaborating through the Center for Bioenergy Innovation make the case that scientific advances support a hybrid approach using biological and catalytic methods for producing cellulosic biofuel for use in airplanes, ships and long-haul trucks.
ORNL story tips: Clean water bots, self-sanitizing N95 masks, cooking with hydrogen
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right
