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In 1959, then-Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, became surely the most glamorous couple ever to stand on the viewing platform of the Oak Ridge Research Reactor.

The Kennedys are just two of the host of dignitaries from around the world who have made ORNL a destination because of i...

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ORNL’s nuclear pioneers understood early on that this new technology would demand the hardiest of materials.

Nuclear reactors—with high temperatures and pressures, corrosive and oxidizing liquids, and heavy neutron bombardment—are a uniquely hostile environment for the materials that go into thei...

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In the early 1970s, scientists at laboratories worldwide raced to unravel the mystery of how billions of miles of DNA are packaged inside the cells of the human body.

ORNL’s Don and Ada Olins were the first to discover the critical structure—the nucleosome—that winds DNA around proteins like thre...

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What do you do when you can’t test your technology?

The United States faced that question when it halted nuclear weapons testing in 1992. The answer came in the form of virtual tests using high-performance computers.

Although “stockpile stewardship,” as it was known, drove the rapid developmen...

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Conspiracy theories are nothing new. When President Zachary Taylor took sick and died 16 months into his presidency in 1850, he had been a relatively healthy war hero. A fatal gastric malady struck after he consumed fruit and iced milk at a July 4th celebration.

Slavery was the issue of the day, ...

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You can gain a lot by creating and sorting ions.

Mass spectrometry, as the technique is known, was the basis for the calutrons at the nearby Y-12 Plant that enriched uranium for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it continues be a powerful analytical tool today.

“From the very orig...

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In outer space, beyond what is considered our solar system, a small spacecraft that looks like a TV satellite dish is still transmitting back to Earth. Deep-space missions have revealed the secrets of the solar system and beyond for nearly a half century. ORNL technology helps make these missions...