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ORNL ecosystem scientist Colleen Iversen talked to fourth-grade students at Coulter Grove Intermediate School in Maryville on Friday, April 23, as part of National Environmental Education Week.

Esther Parish is one of eight scientists from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory talking to students in nine schools across East Tennessee as part of National Environmental Education Week, or EE Week.

Heavy-duty vehicles contribute 23% of transportation emissions of greenhouse gases and account for almost one-quarter of the fuel consumed annually in the U.S. Credit: Chris Bair/Unsplash

Through a consortium of Department of Energy national laboratories, ORNL scientists are applying their expertise to provide solutions that enable the commercialization of emission-free hydrogen fuel cell technology for heavy-duty

FAF5 diagram

A newly released dataset that tracks the movement of everything from food to gasoline across the United States by air, water, truck, rail and pipeline showed the value and tonnage of those goods rose significantly between 2012 and 2017.

Spin chains in a quantum system undergo a collective twisting motion as the result of quasiparticles clustering together. Demonstrating this KPZ dynamics concept are pairs of neighboring spins, shown in red, pointing upward in contrast to their peers, in blue, which alternate directions. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Using complementary computing calculations and neutron scattering techniques, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories and the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the existence of an elusive type of spin dynamics in a quantum mechanical system.

Nesaraja split her effort between nuclear data evaluation and experimentation at ORNL’s now-closed Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Nuclear physicist Caroline Nesaraja of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory evaluates nuclear data vital to applied and basic sciences. 

ORNL researchers used an electrochemical process to heal dendrites that formed in a ceramic, garnet-based catalyst designed for a solid-state lithium battery. Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully demonstrated a technique to heal dendrites that formed in a solid electrolyte, resolving an issue that can hamper the performance of high energy-density, solid-state batteries.

Xin Sun

Xin Sun has been selected as the associate laboratory director for the Energy Science and Technology Directorate, or ESTD, at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Each point on the sphere of this visual representation of arbitrary frequency-bin qubit states corresponds to a unique quantum state, and the gray sections represent the measurement results. The zoomed-in view illustrates examples of three quantum states plotted next to their ideal targets (blue dots). Credit: Joseph Lukens/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A team of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Purdue University has taken an important step toward this goal by harnessing the frequency, or color, of light. Such capabilities could contribute to more practical and large-scale quantum networks exponentially more powerful and secure than the classical networks we have today.

Transition metals stitched into graphene with an electron beam form promising quantum building blocks. Credit: Ondrej Dyck, Andrew Lupini and Jacob Swett/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists demonstrated that an electron microscope can be used to selectively remove carbon atoms from graphene’s atomically thin lattice and stitch transition-metal dopant atoms in their place.

ORNL researchers are developing a method to print low-cost, high-fidelity, customizable sensors for monitoring power grid equipment. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A method developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to print high-fidelity, passive sensors for energy applications can reduce the cost of monitoring critical power grid assets.