National security could be enhanced with a system that quickly sorts and evaluates spatial and geographic information captured in enormous volumes of images. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory-developed system combines the lab's expertise in a number of areas and addresses the problem of having too m...
Nanoscale synthetic cell membranes developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory move researchers one step closer to creating artificial cells and manmade interfaces that could one day be used to treat diseases and perform other tasks at the cellular level. In a paper to be published in an upcoming iss...
Natural methane hydrate deposits offer a potentially vast source of energy, greatly surpassing all known fossil fuel resources, but many questions and challenges remain before these deposits can be tapped. Clathrate hydrates, which consist of a gas molecule surrounded by a cage of water molecules to...
Instant analysis of the composition of air particulates especially vital in an air quality emergency is possible with the Aerosol Plasma Spectrometer. Conventional methods used for air monitoring require samples to be taken from a site to a laboratory for analysis, taking anywhere from hours to ...
Studying how glasses react to extreme pressure helps scientists understand how their structure evolves. The research team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Chris Tulk used a newly designed pressure cell to exert 15 GPa (about 2,200,000 pounds per square inch) upon a sample of germania (GeO2) gl...
Spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors could be minimized and burn-up potentially doubled if Gamma Engineering's new silicon carbide-based cladding proves viable. Conventional cladding, the tubing that contains the enriched uranium that fuels reactors, becomes brittle and must...
The way growing piles of sand behave with bursts of energy that result in large and small avalanches has served as a model for fusion researchers seeking insight into the way magnetically confined plasmas behave in fusion reactors. The same research into self-organizing systems has also lent its...
High-resolution computational simulations and advanced visualizations are enabling researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to identify and gain a better understanding of proteins. Until recently, protein complexes have been viewed as static entities with biological function understood in terms ...
Semiconducting polymers that emit light of different colors for hours instead of minutes could have a bright future in the world of cryptography. What makes this possible is a technique developed by Mike Barnes of the lab's Chemical Sciences Division that produces uniformly oriented ...