Feature Articles

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 11-Jul-2025 14:10 ET (11-Jul-2025 18:10 GMT/UTC)

Traffic-based analyses of buildings advance smart city capabilities

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

To determine how these daily mobility patterns affect energy usage, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory partnered with the Smart City Division within the City of Chattanooga’s Department of Information Technology. Benefits from this work could ultimately include more efficient heating and cooling of buildings based on their populations and faster, better informed responses in emergency scenarios.

Journal: Building Simulation
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

COVID-19 in the classroom: Simulating the spread

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team led by Rao Kotamarthi at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory is using supercomputers at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study how aerosol viral particles are distributed in a ventilated classroom as part of COVID-19 research.

Funder: Biological and Environmental Research, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research
Meeting: 74th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics

Carbon-negative platform turns waste gases into valuable chemicals

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team of scientists from LanzaTech, Northwestern University and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed carbon capture technology that harnesses emissions from industrial processes to produce acetone and isopropanol, known as IPA. These widely used chemicals serve as the basis of thousands of products, from fuels and solvents to acrylic glass and fabrics.

Journal: Nature Biotechnology
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

ORNL experts help measure new world record for fusion energy

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Diagnostics experts at Oak Ridge National Laboratory played a key role in this month's fusion milestone at the Joint European Torus (JET) by measuring what was happening inside the plasma.

Supercomputing for swift protein modeling

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team at Arizona State University used the nation's fastest supercomputer, Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to simulate millions of structures and gain new insights into how proteins transition to different shapes.

Journal: Matter
Funder: Advanced Scientific Computing Research, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation, NIH/National Institutes of Health, NIH/National Institutes of Health, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Science Foundation, Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery, NIH/National Institutes of Health

Supercomputing exposes potential pathways for inhibiting COVID-19

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

To explore the inner workings of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a novel technique.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Polymer upcycling of common plastic adds toughness, recyclability to structural adhesives

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used polymer chemistry to transform a common household plastic into a reusable adhesive with a rare combination of strength and ductility, making it one of the toughest materials ever reported.

Taking on decarbonization in the ag sector: ORNL summit highlights focus areas

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Energy and sustainability experts from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, industry, universities and the federal government recently identified key focus areas to meet the challenge of successfully decarbonizing the agriculture sector, as well as scientific resources that the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories can bring to the table.

Artificially altered material could accelerate neuromorphic device development

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Neuromorphic devices — which emulate the decision-making processes of the human brain — show great promise for solving pressing scientific problems, but building physical systems to realize this potential presents researchers with a significant challenge. An international team has gained additional insights into a material compound called vanadium oxide, or VO2, that might be the missing ingredient needed to complete a reliable neuromorphic recipe.

Journal: Physical Review B
Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy, National Research Foundation of Korea

Scientists use Summit supercomputer, deep learning to predict protein functions at genome scale

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Georgia Institute of Technology is using supercomputing and revolutionary deep learning tools to predict the structures and roles of thousands of proteins with unknown functions.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

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