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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.

A tree outside ORNL researcher Pratul Agarwal's office window provided the inspiration for a discovery that may ultimately lead to drugs with fewer side effects, less expensive biofuels and more.

The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has awarded a contract to Cray Inc. to increase the Jaguar supercomputer's science impact and energy efficiency.