With today's unprecedented demands for power—as demonstrated by this summer's Southern heat wave—superconducting technology promises to turn on an electricity faucet and expand the current capacity of the nation's power grid. Key to that transition, is development of new and improved insulating mate...
Different zests for beer might reveal more about alcohol's effect on the brain reward system than inherent differences in taste sensitivity, according to findings by a group of researchers led by Judy Grisel of Furman University. In a study using mice at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Grisel and ORN...
Oak Ridge National Laboratory's efforts at improving energy efficiency could save NASA more than $820,000. Mike MacDonald and Julia Kelley of ORNL's Commercial Buildings and Industrial Energy Efficiency Group led a review of the design and construction proposal of 12 packaged modular boiler systems ...
The Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source, which recently set a record for beam power for a pulsed neutron source while operating at only a tenth of its eventual 1.4 megawatts of power, has added a fourth instrument to its growing arsenal. The Wide Angular-Range Chopper Spectrometer (ARC...
Band excitation, a new family of scanning probe microscopy, moves the field towards probing energy transformation at the nanoscale, say the developers. Conventional scanning probe microscopes measure the cantilever's movements over the surface of a material at only one single frequency. Band excitat...
Oak Ridge National Laboratory research has aided in development of two new lines of wireless sensor products targeted at manufacturers by industry heavyweights Honeywell and General Electric. The instrument offerings—RF ValProbe by GE and OneWireless by Honeywell—represent a new generation of wirele...
As the Tennessee Valley Authority deals with record afternoon electricity demand during the current heat wave, a home in Lenoir City is actually selling power back into the system. Utilities are paying premium prices during peak demand periods to supply power to businesses and homes. Instead of cont...
Pulp and paper plants in the future may operate at lower energy levels as the result of a new joint technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Swagelok Company of Solon, Ohio. ORNL researchers Vinod Sikka, Dane Wilson, Jun Qu and Peter Blau of the laboratory's Industrial Technologies ...
ORNL is part of an ambitious international effort to decode the genome of Eucalyptus, one of the world's most valuable fiber and paper-producing trees and only the second tree to have its DNA sequenced. Jerry Tuskan of ORNL's Environmental Science Division co-leads the effort to characterize the Euc...
The recently-opened Dell Regional Children's Medical Center in Austin, Texas, is demonstrating the future in self-sufficient power, with the help of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Working with researchers in ORNL's Buildings Technology Center, the medical facility has installed a combined heat and p...