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ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia (center, seated) visited Robertsville Middle School to present a check in support of the school’s CubeSat efforts.

Last November a team of students and educators from Robertsville Middle School in Oak Ridge and scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory submitted a proposal to NASA for their Cube Satellite Launch Initiative in hopes of sending a student-designed nanosatellite named RamSat into...

A conceptual illustration of proton-proton fusion in which two protons fuse to form a deuteron. Image courtesy of William Detmold.

Nuclear physicists are using the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to study particle interactions important to energy production in the Sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries Direct calculatio...

An ORNL-led team conducts moisture durability simulations on construction materials, which will add real-world data to a new system developed to help builders and home designers make informed decisions. Credit: Rachel Brooks/Oak Ridge National Laboratory,

A new system being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory will help builders and home designers select the best construction materials for long-term moisture durability. “It has become challenging to make informed decisions because of modern building code requirements and new ...

A senior research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Olufemi “Femi” Omitaomu is leveraging Big Data for urban resilience. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; photographer Jason Richards.

At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Olufemi “Femi” Omitaomu is leveraging Big Data for urban resilience, helping growing cities support future infrastructure and resource needs. A senior research scientist for ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineeri...

ORNL’s Steven Young (left) and Travis Johnston used Titan to prove the design and training of deep learning networks could be greatly accelerated with a capable computing system.

A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has married artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to achieve a peak speed of 20 petaflops in the generation and training of deep learning networks on the

ORNL researcher Miaofang Chi refines her microscopy techniques toward understanding how and why materials have certain properties.

Material surfaces and interfaces may appear flat and void of texture to the naked eye, but a view from the nanoscale reveals an intricate tapestry of atomic patterns that control the reactions between the material and its environment. Electron microscopy allows researchers to probe...

By producing 50 grams of plutonium-238, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have demonstrated the nation’s ability to provide a valuable energy source for deep space missions.

With the production of 50 grams of plutonium-238, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have restored a U.S. capability dormant for nearly 30 years and set the course to provide power for NASA and other missions.

Pellet selector

When it’s up and running, the ITER fusion reactor will be very big and very hot, with more than 800 cubic meters of hydrogen plasma reaching 170 million degrees centigrade. The systems that fuel and control it, on the other hand, will be small and very cold. Pellets of frozen gas will be shot int...

Processing plutonium-238

Since its 1977 launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled farther than any other piece of human technology. It is also the only human-made object to have entered interstellar space. More recently, the agency’s New Horizons mission flew past Pluto on July 14, giving us our first close-up lo...