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Tristen Mullins enjoys the hidden side of computers. As a signals processing engineer for ORNL, she tries to uncover information hidden in components used on the nation’s power grid — information that may be susceptible to cyberattacks.

Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.

ORNL will team up with six of eight companies that are advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants with the mission to achieve a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade.

Using disinformation to create political instability and battlefield confusion dates back millennia. However, today’s disinformation actors use social media to amplify disinformation that users knowingly or, more often, unknowingly perpetuate. Such disinformation spreads quickly, threatening public health and safety. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic and recent global elections have given the world a front-row seat to this form of modern warfare.

A technology developed at ORNL and used by the U.S. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, or NAVWAR, to test the capabilities of commercial security tools has been licensed to cybersecurity firm Penguin Mustache to create its Evasive.ai platform. The company was founded by the technology’s creator, former ORNL scientist Jared M. Smith, and his business partner, entrepreneur Brandon Bruce.

The Autonomous Systems group at ORNL is in high demand as it incorporates remote sensing into projects needing a bird’s-eye perspective.

Natural gas furnaces not only heat your home, they also produce a lot of pollution. Even modern high-efficiency condensing furnaces produce significant amounts of corrosive acidic condensation and unhealthy levels of nitrogen oxides

U2opia Technology, a consortium of technology and administrative executives with extensive experience in both industry and defense, has exclusively licensed two technologies from ORNL that offer a new method for advanced cybersecurity monitoring in real time.

A partnership of ORNL, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, the Community Reuse Organization of East Tennessee and TVA that aims to attract nuclear energy-related firms to Oak Ridge has been recognized with a state and local economic development award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium.

Paul Langan will join ORNL in the spring as associate laboratory director for the Biological and Environmental Systems Science Directorate.