Solar cells, light emitting diodes, displays and other electronic devices could get a bump in performance because of a discovery at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that establishes new boundaries for controlling band gaps.
U.S. ITER researchers at the Fusion Pellet Fueling Lab at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are developing and testing pellet injector technology for fueling and controlling the hot plasma in the ITER tokamak experimental reactor. Current research is focused on U.S. ITER contributions to fueling, disrup...
Researchers at the Bio-SANS instrument at the High Flux Isotope Reactor used contrast variation and small-angle neutron scattering to get a first insight into how macromolecules form single polyelectrolyte chains in synthetic complexes. The unique properties of polyelectrolyte materials are of inten...
The Sindbis virus, or SINV, is the prototype for viruses spread by insects, which cause some of the most devastating and widespread diseases among humans. Exposure to low pH (acidic) conditions causes dramatic changes in the three-dimensional structure of SINV that can help the virus membrane fuse w...
Several recent papers describe how Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Yuri Melnichenko and his collaborators continue to use neutrons and small-angle neutron scattering to bore through geological materials such as nanoporous carbons to understand their unique properties as storage media for gr...
Studies of bacteria first found in Yellowstone's hot springs are furthering efforts at the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center toward commercially viable ethanol production from crops such as switchgrass.
A combination of advanced techniques at Oak Ridge National Laboratory helped researchers gain a better understanding of how some proteins attack bacteria. Colicins, a family of protein toxins, kill E. coli by crossing the bacterial membrane to exert their toxic effects. One family member, Colicin N,...
Molecular-level studies of tension wood formation in poplars could ultimately fuel the discovery of biomass crops with thicker cell walls, less lignin and more cellulose that can be converted into ethanol. While typical poplar woody biomass is composed of about 45 percent cellulose, tension wood cel...
Changing the behavior of a material isn't big magic? it's nanoscale chemistry. Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla used the computing power of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, America's fastest, to study the effects of adding oxygen, sulfur and hydrogen to nanoribbons made of boron nitri...
An upgrade is transforming Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, America's fastest, into Titan, a next-generation supercomputer that will employ the latest AMD Opteron central processing units as well as NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units ? energy-efficient processors that accele...