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Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studies a proposed graphene substrate: boron nitride. Graphene, which is carbon in the form of freestanding 1-atom-thick sheets, is a natural for next-generation computer chips, communications equipment, and solar energy devices. Electrons flow through the material at an astonishing 1 million meters per second. To live up to its potential, however, graphene needs support. On its own, its edges wrinkle, tear, or roll up.

Armed with a new ability to find retinal anomalies at the cellular level, neurobiologists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have made a discovery they hope will ultimately lead to a treatment for cancer of the retina.

Using statistical analysis methods to examine rainfall extremes in India, a team of researchers has made a discovery that resolves an ongoing debate in published findings and offers new insights.

Jack Wells spoke about collaborative opportunities in high-performance computing at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. He highlighted pathways by which industrial users can gain access to supercomputers. Approximately 60 percent of time available on Jaguar, America's fastest supercomputer, is allocated through the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program, whereas 30 percent is allocated through the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge and 10 percent through Director's Discretion.

1) Computer hackers could lose a huge advantage. 2) Solar and wind energy could become more viable. 3) Something odd happens when you expose the element gadolinium to a strong magnetic field. 4) Carefully combining materials that shrink when heated with materials that expand creates a material unaffected by extreme temperature.

As the number of processors continues to increase in leadership-class supercomputers, their ability to perform parallel computation -- doing multiple calculations simultaneously -- becomes increasingly important. The surge in machine size and complexity has led the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility computer scientists to try new and interesting strategies to keep large systems running at the highest efficiency. Their efforts have nearly tripled performance for synchronizing collective operations.

A multi-institutional research team led by Ivaylo Ivanov of Georgia State University has employed the Jaguar XT4 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and X-rays a billion times brighter than the sun, produced at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to illuminate how DNA replication continues past a damaged site so a lesion can be repaired later. The results appear in the Oct. 17, 2011, online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The following are story tips from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, November 2011.