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Jack Orebaugh, a forensic anthropology major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a big heart for families with missing loved ones. When someone disappears in an area of dense vegetation, search and recovery efforts can be difficult, especially when a missing person’s last location is unknown. Recognizing the agony of not knowing what happened to a family or friend, Orebaugh decided to use his internship at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to find better ways to search for lost and deceased people using cameras and drones. 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists identified a gene “hotspot” in the poplar tree that triggers dramatically increased root growth. The discovery supports development of better bioenergy crops and other plants that can thrive in difficult conditions while storing more carbon belowground.

Tristen Mullins enjoys the hidden side of computers. As a signals processing engineer for ORNL, she tries to uncover information hidden in components used on the nation’s power grid — information that may be susceptible to cyberattacks.

In human security research, Thomaz Carvalhaes says, there are typically two perspectives: technocentric and human centric. Rather than pick just one for his work, Carvalhaes uses data from both perspectives to understand how technology impacts the lives of people.

Tackling the climate crisis and achieving an equitable clean energy future are among the biggest challenges of our time. 

Unequal access to modern infrastructure is a feature of growing cities, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

ORNL scientists had a problem mapping the genomes of bacteria to better understand the origins of their physical traits and improve their function for bioenergy production.

Diverse evidence shows that plants and soil will likely capture and hold more carbon in response to increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to an analysis

From materials science and earth system modeling to quantum information science and cybersecurity, experts in many fields run simulations and conduct experiments to collect the abundance of data necessary for scientific progress.

To better determine the potential energy cost savings among connected homes, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a computer simulation to more accurately compare energy use on similar weather days.