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When a neutron star forms, compression creates heat that generates neutrinos. When the star’s core collapses, a shock wave propagates around the star but stalls. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy; created by J.A. Harris.

The Big Bang began the formation and organization of the matter that makes up ourselves and our world. Nearly 14 billion years later, nuclear physicists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and their partners are using America’s most powerful supercomp...

ORNL’s 2017 Molten Salt Reactor Workshop offered a wide range of talks on advanced reactors, including modeling and simulation techniques, commercial licensing strategies and the Department of Energy’s efforts to work with industry on developing designs.

The third annual Molten Salt Reactor Workshop allowed leading voices on advanced reactors—including scientists from the national laboratory system, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, reactor design firms and universities—to discuss current efforts in molten salt reactor work and pu...

conventional sedan

It’s common knowledge that driving aggressively can dent gas mileage, but it’s difficult to determine exactly how much gas drivers waste. A new study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has quantified the impact speeding and slamming on the brakes has on fuel economy and consumption. They found that aggressive behavior behind the wheel can lower gas mileage in light-duty vehicles by about 10 to 40 percent in stop-and-go traffic and roughly 15 to 30 percent at highway speeds. This can equate to losing about $0.25 to $1 per gallon.

Ctherm on Biomass CSLM

With the licensing to Enchi Corporation of a microbe custom-designed to produce ethanol efficiently, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) mark the culmination of 10 years’ research into ways to improve biofuels production. Enchi ha...

Former University of Tennessee football coach Phillip Fulmer (right) helps ORNL celebrate $858,000 of contributions to this year’s United Way campaign.
Former University of Tennessee football coach Phillip Fulmer praised UT-Battelle employees at Oak Ridge National Laboratory during a Leadership Givers Breakfast for contributing $858,000 to this year’s United Way campaign. Fulmer, who is involved with several U...
Rick Raines

Richard “Rick” Raines has been on the forefront of protecting critical communications systems from attack since before the term “cyber” was in vogue, and he is bringing that leadership to bear as he takes on the role of director for the Electrical and Electronics Systems Research Division (EESRD) at...

Arjun Shankar

The field of “Big Data” has exploded in the blink of an eye, growing exponentially into almost every branch of science in just a few decades. Sectors such as energy, manufacturing, healthcare and many others depend on scalable data processing and analysis for continued in...

2017 GEM Fellows

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosted eight graduate students as part of the National GEM Consortium summer fellowship program this year—seven in the Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate and one in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. The par...

Scientists will use ORNL’s computing resources such as the Titan supercomputer to develop deep learning solutions for data analysis. Credit: Jason Richards/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

A team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded nearly $2 million over three years from the Department of Energy to explore the potential of machine learning in revolutionizing scientific data analysis. The Advances in Machine Learning to Improve Scient...

Particles collide and stream through ALICE’s detectors, such as the time-projection chamber shown here, and leave tracks that reveal their velocities, momenta and energies. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; photographer Ja

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began running at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2009. The LHC spends most of its time studying the puzzles of high-energy physics. But for one month a year, it, like the Relat...