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Flora Meilleur (middle) works with teachers participating in her project, helping them mix the protein solution lysozyme with a salt solution to form a crystal. The teachers mix the solutions in various concentrations and ratios and observe the results.
Summer break for a group of science educators and students means hands-on research in high-heat plasmas, supercomputer construction, biofuels and more, thanks to the annual Math-Science-Technology Institute held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The program, a partnership among OR...
ORNL will lend computational resources such as its Titan supercomputer to support the Cancer Moonshot effort.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will add its computational know-how to the battle against cancer through several new projects recently announced at the White House Cancer Moonshot Summit. 

OLCF Vimeo Screenshot

While trying to fatten the atom in 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn accidentally split it instead. This surprising discovery put modern science on the fast track to the atomic age and to the realization of technologies with profound potential for great harm or great help. Altho...

Ron Graves (right) with fellow Tennessee Automotive Manufacturers Association Hall of Fame inductee former Gov. Phil Bredesen (left) and TAMA President Rick Youngblood.

Sitting in the driver’s seat comes naturally to Ron Graves, the recently retired head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s sustainable transportation program. Graves has logged more than 100 days on national racetracks like Daytona, Road Atlanta, and Pocono where he routinely reache...

ORNL software engineer Eric Lingerfelt (right) and Stephen Jesse (left) of ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences led the development of the Bellerophon Environment for Analysis of Materials (BEAM).
Using today’s advanced microscopes, scientists are able to capture exponentially more information about the materials they study compared to a decade ago—in greater detail and in less time. While these new capabilities are a boon for researchers, helping to answer key quest...
Mike Brady
When Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Mike Brady began his freshman year at Virginia Tech, he’d never heard of materials sciences. Now he’s a fellow of ASM International, the largest and most prestigious association of metals-centric materials scientists in the world. A na...
This 3-D structure was created in a microscope. On the left is the structure; on the right is the simulation that shows how to create such a structure.

Additive manufacturing techniques featuring atomic precision could one day create materials with Legos flexibility and Terminator toughness, according to researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In a review paper published in ACS Nano, Olga Ovchinni...

Simon Pallin

A scientist that sings opera and performs in musical theater? Sure. If you're a Renaissance Man like Simon Pallin. Pallin is a researcher in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Buildings Technologies Research & Integration Center. But his early interests and activities reveal a versatile person that could have chosen a number of occupations.

The image above shows the chain of the studied calcium isotopes. The “doubly magic” isotopes with mass numbers 40 (Ca-40) and 48 (Ca-48) exhibit equal charge radii. The first measurement of the charge radius in Ca-52 yielded an unexpectedly large result.

For decades nuclear physicists have tried to learn more about which elements, or their various isotopes, are “magic.” This is not to say that they display supernatural powers. Magic atomic nuclei are composed of “magic” numbers of protons and neutrons—collectively called nucleons—such as 2, 8, 20, and 28.

In conventional, low-temperature superconductivity (left), so-called Cooper pairing arises from the presence of an electron Fermi sea. In the pseudogap regime of the cuprate superconductors (right), parts of the Fermi sea are “dried out” and the charge-ca
When physicists Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller discovered the first high-temperature superconductors in 1986, it didn’t take much imagination to envision the potential technological benefits of harnessing such materials.