News

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.

Since its inception in 2010, the program bolsters national scientific discovery by supporting early career researchers in fields pertaining to the Office of Science.

ORNL researchers, in collaboration with Enginuity Power Systems, demonstrated that a micro combined heat and power prototype, or mCHP, with a piston engine can achieve an overall energy efficiency greater than 93%. 

A team including researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a digital tool to better monitor a condition known as Barrett’s esophagus, which affects more than 3 million people in the United States.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have identified a statistical relationship between the growth of cities and the spread of paved surfaces like roads and sidewalks. These impervious surfaces impede the flow of water into the ground, affecting the water cycle and, by extension, the climate.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers proved that the heat transport ability of lithium-ion battery cathodes is much lower than previously determined, a finding that could help explain barriers to increasing energy storage capacity and boosting performance.

A study led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory explored the interface between the Department of Veterans Affairs’ healthcare data system and the data itself to detect the likelihood of errors and designed an auto-surveillance tool

While studying the genes in poplar trees that control callus formation, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have uncovered genetic networks at the root of tumor formation in several human cancers.

For decades, biologists have believed a key enzyme in plants had one function—produce amino acids, which are vital to plant survival and also essential to human diets. But for Wellington Muchero, Meng Xie and their colleagues, this enzyme does more than advertised. They had run a series of experiments on poplar plants that consistently revealed mutations in a structure of the life-sustaining enzyme that was not previously known to exist.