Quantum precision reached in modeling molten salt behavior
Designing highway barriers better able to protect motorists, buildings and their occupants is the driving force behind a project headed by Srdan Simunovic of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Computer Science and Mathematics Division. His task is to fine-tune a Federal Highway Administration computer ...
With eight cabinets, 256 processors and 3.2 teraflops (3.2 trillion calculations per second) of computing power, Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Cray X1 is the largest of its type in the world. Add that total to the lab's IBM Cheetah with 4.5 teraflops, the SGI Ram with 1.5 teraflops and the IBM Eag...
New computer models have bolstered the case for a theory of what causes a white-dwarf supernova to occur. Under certain conditions, the massive stellar explosions happen when a white dwarf star in a binary system accretes material from its neighbor until, eventually, the big blast occurs. ORNL astro...
Techniques to find microbial life in the depths of our planet may be useful for determining whether there is life on Mars. At least that's the idea behind a five-year $5 million NASA project that taps the expertise of Tommy Phelps of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Susan Pfiffner of the University...
Anthrax and other potentially deadly biological agents pose considerable threats to the military and the public, but Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers think they have a quick and safe cure. In a matter of seconds, the ultraviolet portion of an arc plasma lamp can kill the bacteria because it...
It cost a family of four living in a next-generation Habitat for Humanity house just 82 cents a day in total energy bills, and the project continues to gain momentum. The house boasts impressive air tightness in addition to an advanced ventilation system that controls mold, mildew and moisture. A ma...
Military personnel loading military cargo planes with trucks and material can speed up the process and reduce the chances for mistakes with weigh-in-motion technology being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dave Beshears of the lab's Engineering Science and Technology Division notes that t...
Working with SpectruMedix Corp., researchers at ORNL could soon find mutations in mice in months instead of years. Researchers are using the Temperature-Gradient Capillary Electrophoresis system to identify mutations simultaneously in 96 samples in less than an hour. This scanning technique has 13 t...
Most criminals know about robots armed with cameras and shotguns, but there's a new law enforcement weapon on the horizon. Actually, the weapon is a micro-robot about the size of a june bug, so it's only on the horizon if you're at floor level. And that's the idea, according to developers in ORNL's ...
Thousands of landfills around the nation may be serving as bioreactors, turning inorganic mercury into methylated - or organic - mercury, according to a study by researchers at ORNL. An unknown but likely significant amount of methylated mercury, which is far more toxic than inorganic mercury, is be...