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Viruses are tiny—merely millionths of a millimeter in diameter—but what they lack in size, they make up in quantity.
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From the bluebird painting propped against her office wall and the deer she mentions seeing outside her office window, Linda Lewis might be mistaken for a wildlife biologist at first glance. But rather than trailing animal tracks, Lewis, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is more interested in marks left behind by humans.

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With more than 30 patents, James Klett is no stranger to success, but perhaps the Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher’s most noteworthy achievement didn’t start out so hot – or so it seemed at the time.

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Andrew Stack, a geochemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, advances understanding of the dynamics of minerals underground.

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Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are learning how the properties of water molecules on the surface of metal oxides can be used to better control these minerals and use them to make products such as more efficient semiconductors for organic light emitting diodes and solar cells, safer vehicle glass in fog and frost, and more environmentally friendly chemical sensors for industrial applications.
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Researchers studying iron-based superconductors are combining novel electronic structure algorithms with the high-performance computing power of the Department of Energy’s Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to predict spin dynamics, or the ways electrons orient and correlate their spins in a material.
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Throw a rock through a window made of silica glass, and the brittle, insulating oxide pane shatters. But whack a golf ball with a club made of metallic glass—a resilient conductor that looks like metal—and the glass not only stays intact but also may drive the ball farther than conventional clubs. In light of this contrast, the nature of glass seems anything but clear.
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Complex oxides have long tantalized the materials science community for their promise in next-generation energy and information technologies. Complex oxide crystals combine oxygen atoms with assorted metals to produce unusual and very desirable properties.
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If you were to do an internet search for what causes engine knock, you’d receive a number of answers. Ramanan Sankaran—a scientific computing specialist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and joint faculty member at the University of Tennessee—wants to take Titan through the fuel lines to help identify the right one.
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When Orlando Rios first started analyzing samples of carbon fibers made from a woody plant polymer known as lignin, he noticed something unusual. The material’s microstructure -- a mixture of perfectly spherical nanoscale crystallites distributed within a fibrous matrix -- looked almost too good to be true.