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Studies of bacteria first found in Yellowstone's hot springs are furthering efforts at the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center toward commercially viable ethanol production from crops such as switchgrass.

Steven J. Zinkle, a senior materials researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Researchers using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's can foresee substantial changes in scientific application code development. The OLCF's new supercomputer, Titan, will use a hybrid architecture of conventional, multipurpose CPUs and high-performance GPUs. The machine will supplant the OLCF's current fastest supercomputer, Jaguar, a Cray XT5 using an entirely CPU-based platform. Members of the OLCF's Application Performance Tools group understand the challenge. Their goal is to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Envirofit International, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Colorado State University have won a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for excellence in technology transfer for a clean-burning cookstove designed for the developing world.

By using a novel technique to better understand mineral growth and dissolution, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are improving predictions of mineral reactions and laying the groundwork for applications ranging from keeping oil pipes clear to sequestering radium.

Among the ORNL's January 2012 story tips are articles about how carbon trapped in permafrost soils could be released a lot faster than previously thought; the Coast Guard going green; and tracking cell death protein.

To better understand the fundamental behavior of molecules at surfaces, researchers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are combining the powers of neutron scattering with chemical analysis.

The prospect of electronics at the nanoscale may be even more promising with the first observation of metallic conductance in ferroelectric nanodomains by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.