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A nuclear density map of the bacterial enzyme HpMTAN’s active site reveals the locations of the hydrogen atoms, including the unexpected observation of a hydrogen ion positioned midway between adenine and D198 residue.
Neutron analysis at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is helping researchers better understand a key enzyme found in a bacterium known to cause stomach cancer. Understanding the details of this enzyme, and thus the Helicobacter pylori bacteria’s metabolis...
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Snow falls in winter and melts in spring, but what drives the phase change in between?

Contrasting solvation strategies in conventional electrolytes (top-left) and a new class of Lewis-acidic polymer electrolytes (bottom-left).
Ever since Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the first battery out of a stack of copper and zinc disks separated by moistened cardboard, scientists have been searching for better battery materials.
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam visited the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory today to congratulate the ORNL team involved in the discovery of the element tennessine, named in recognition of the vital contributions of the state of Tennessee to the int...
Ramakrishnan “Ramki” Kannan loves the excitement and challenge of working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home to Titan.

Supercomputers like Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan are advancing science at a frenetic pace and helping researchers make sense of data that could have easily been missed, says Ramakrishnan “Ramki” Kannan. Kannan, a computer scientist who came to ORNL in March 2016 after ...

ORNL researchers have discovered a new type of quantum critical point, a new way in which materials change from one state of matter to another. Featured here are researchers Lekh Poudel (left), Andrew Christianson and Andrew May.
When matter changes from solids to liquids to vapors, the changes are called phase transitions. Among the most interesting types are more exotic changes—quantum phase transitions—where the strange properties of quantum mechanics can bring about extraordinary changes in curious way...
 ORNL scientists studied ways to enhance the proposed memory cell performance and minimize access times and energies, yielding a novel cryogenic, or low-temperature, design that may resolve a memory storage bottleneck.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have proposed a novel cryogenic, or low-temperature, memory cell circuit design that may resolve a memory storage bottleneck, accelerating the pathway to exascale and quantum computing. The proposed design converges write, read and reset ...
Brenda Pracheil and Bryan Chakoumakos examine the structure of an otolith under a microscope.
Scientific discovery can come from anywhere, but few researchers can say the answers to their questions would come from the pea-sized bones in the head of a six-foot-long, 200-pound prehistoric freshwater fish. In a unique pairing of biology and neutron science, researchers from...
This image shows an artist’s depiction of the team’s QCD multigrid method.
Scientists are only beginning to understand the laws that govern the atomic world. Before the 1950s the electrons, neutrons, and protons comprising atoms were the smallest confirmed units of matter.
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The recently discovered element 117 has been officially named "tennessine" in recognition of Tennessee’s contributions to its discovery, including the efforts of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its Tennessee collaborators at Vanderbilt University and the University of Tennessee.