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Working backwards has moved Josh Michener’s research far forward as he uses evolution and genetics to engineer microbes for better conversion of plants into biofuels and biochemicals. In his work for the BioEnergy Science Center at ORNL, for instance, “we’ve gotten good at engineering microbes th...

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It’s been 10 years since the US Department of Energy first established a BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and researcher Gerald “Jerry” Tuskan has used that time and the lab’s and center’s resources and tools

COHERENT collaborators were the first to observe coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering. Their results, published in the journal Science, confirm a prediction of the Standard Model and establish constraints on alternative theoretical models. Image c

After more than a year of operation at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the COHERENT experiment, using the world’s smallest neutrino detector, has found a big fingerprint of the elusive, electrically neutral particles that interact only weakly with matter.

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In a first-of-a-kind experiment, researchers used neutrons to investigate the performance of a new aluminum alloy in a gasoline-powered engine—while the engine was running. A team from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked with industry partners to perfor...
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Researchers used neutrons to probe a running engine at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source

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Using neutron scattering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a research team captured a time-sensitive phenomenon to prove that the entropy, or randomness, of atoms in a metallic glass when exposed to intense heat is linked to how atoms self-configure versus their vibration. The large neutron flux of ORNL’s Wide Angular Range Chopper Spectrometer continuously recorded changes in the sample’s vibrations as the temperature slowly increased—a technique not possible a decade ago.
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A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has used sophisticated neutron scattering techniques to detect an elusive quantum state known as the Higgs amplitude mode in a two-dimensional material. The Higgs amplitude mode is a condensed ...
ORNL welcomed its first group of research fellows to join Innovation Crossroads, an entrepreneurial research and development program based at the lab.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory today welcomed the first cohort of innovators to join Innovation Crossroads, the Southeast region's first entrepreneurial research and development program based at a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory. Innovation Crossroads, ...

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Ecologist Virginia Dale is an ORNL corporate fellow and director of the lab’s Center for BioEnergy Sustainability. In her work she focuses on environmental decision making, plant succession, land-use change, landscape ecology, ecological modeling, sustainability, and bioenergy systems. Dale...

Water is seen as small red and white molecules on large nanodiamond spheres. The colored tRNA can be seen on the nanodiamond surface. Image by Michael Mattheson, OLCF, ORNL
It’s not enough to design new drugs. For drugs to be effective, they have to be delivered safely and intact to affected areas of the body. And drug delivery, much like drug design, is an immensely complex task.