News By Location

18-Apr-2018

Spinach used in neutron studies could unearth secret to stronger plant growth

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Researchers from Uppsala University are using neutrons to study RuBisCO, an abundant enzyme essential to life on earth. They hope to determine how plants and other organisms use this enzyme to catalyze a reaction called carbon fixation that converts carbon dioxide into useful organic compounds.

13-Apr-2018

Custom-designed alloy enhances nuclear safety

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Business Announcement

A team led by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a safer cladding for nuclear fuel rods.

2-Apr-2018

Story tips from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, April 2018

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An ORNL-led team cultivated a novel oral microbe in adults with periodontitis; ORNL partnered with FCA US and Nemak to develop a new cast aluminum alloy for engine cylinder heads, which could lead to better fuel efficiency; ORNL studies cast doubt on 40-year-old theory describing how plastic polymers behave during processing.

Journal

mBio

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health

28-Mar-2018

Exceptionally efficient extraction may improve management of nuclear fuel

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A team at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has designed and synthesized a selective molecular trap that can separate the minor actinide element americium from a mixture of americium and the lanthanide elements, using europium as the model lanthanide in experiments. Whereas recovered americium could be burned in nuclear reactors, lanthanides are 'neutron poisons' and must be disposed of in a geologic repository to decay.

27-Mar-2018

Putting quantum scientists in the driver's seat

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An interdisciplinary, interdepartmental group of scientists at ORNL conducted fundamental physics studies at the nanoscale to support development of experimental platforms that will control dissipation in quantum systems and materials.

Journal

Physical Review B

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

26-Mar-2018

Underground neutrino experiment sets the stage for deep discovery about matter

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, collaborators of the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, an experiment led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have shown they can shield a sensitive, scalable 44-kilogram germanium detector array from background radioactivity. This accomplishment is critical to developing and proposing a much larger future experiment -- with approximately a ton of detectors -- to study the nature of neutrinos.

Journal

Physical Review Letters

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy, Laboratory Directed Research and Development Programs, National Science Foundation, DOE/Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Russian Foundation for Basic Research

19-Mar-2018

Neutrons help demystify multiferroic materials

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Using neutrons at ORNL, an international team of researchers identified a multiferroic material that exhibits a rare combination of magnetic and electrical properties. Studying these dual characteristics could lead to significant advances in information storage and power performance in new devices.

14-Mar-2018

ORNL researchers design novel method for energy-efficient deep neural networks

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a novel method for more efficiently training large numbers of networks capable of solving complex science problems. Specifically, Mohammed Alawad, Hong-Jun Yoon, and Gina Tourassi of ORNL's Computer Science and Engineering Division, have demonstrated that by converting deep learning neural networks (DNNs) to 'deep spiking' neural networks (DSNNs) they can improve the efficiency of network design and training.

Funder

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Directed Research and Development program, Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer program

Meeting

2017 IEEE Conference on Big Data

13-Mar-2018

Researchers develop spectroscopic thermometer for nanomaterials

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A scientific team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a new way to take the local temperature of a material from an area about a billionth of a meter wide, or approximately 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. This discovery, published in Physical Review Letters, promises to improve the understanding of useful yet unusual physical and chemical behaviors that arise in materials and structures at the nanoscale.

Journal

Physical Review Letters

Funder

DOE/US Department of Energy

12-Mar-2018

Method to grow large single-crystal graphene could advance scalable 2-D materials

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new method to produce large, monolayer single-crystal-like graphene films more than a foot long relies on harnessing a 'survival of the fittest' competition among crystals. The novel technique, developed by a team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, may open new opportunities for growing the high-quality two-dimensional materials necessary for long-awaited practical applications.

Journal

Nature Materials

Funder

Technology Innovation Program, DOE/Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program