Materials are identified by their properties, desirable or otherwise. Iron is strong, but it rusts. Plastics are versatile and useful but end up polluting the environment because they don’t easily decay.

Scientists and engineers improve materials by manipulating them to get just the right propert...

Plant geneticist Gerald Tuskan is an ORNL corporate fellow and leader of the lab’s Plant Systems Biology Group. Using the computational muscle available at ORNL, Tuskan and his colleagues have resequenced about 1,000 genotypes of the fast-growing perennial poplar tree