Engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are helping Russia build railcars to provide better protection and more secure transport of nuclear material. Under an agreement with the Russian Ministry of Defense, ORNL's Transportation Security Project will work with a Russian railcar maker to design an...
A new method of processing ferrous materials such as steel, developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, promises to produce a new class of materials with novel microstructures and superior properties. The method involves applying a strong magnetic field to a cooling alloy, which resul...
Powerful new inverters incorporating silicon carbide transistors and diodes could help speed the development of hybrid electric vehicles and lead to advances in a number of other areas. Compared to conventional silicon-based power semiconductor switches, the silicon carbide devices feature much bett...
"Cold case files" takes on new meaning for geochemists like Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Steven Turgeon, co-author of a Science paper that might explain a 248-million-year-old event that killed 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrae species. This "extinction even...
Ports in the United States and around the world could be protected with a threat vulnerability analysis system being developed by a team led by Robert Patton of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system, called Orion, will find, analyze and fuse information in support of intelligence, security and m...
Through several refinements to the tried and true method of pulsed laser deposition, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have a new way to synthesize materials and conduct basic studies vital to creating new ones. By continuously monitoring the growth process and precisely controlling the amou...
Abnormalities of the face and skull rank among the most common birth defects in humans. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are taking a systems biology approach to the problem, investigating a series of eight mutant mouse strains that could serve as animal models for deciphering the comple...
Microscopic images that are now achievable at single-nanometer scales usually depict advanced materials or other ordered, inorganic substances. However, a team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (S.V.Kalinin ) and North Carolina State University (A. Gruverman) have applied scanning pr...
Miniature optical sensors developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could speed the development of fuel cells to power vehicles, buildings and machines. The ORNL sensors are extremely accurate, reliable and fast-responding, making them ideal for next-generation fuel cells, according to Steve Alliso...
New products made of stronger components that are lighter in weight, more energy efficient and have an extended use life may be possible through a technology that can alter the characteristics of steel and other materials. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and ...