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Three team members looking at plants stand in front of a mountain scene, two are in orange safety vests.

When the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory science mission takes staff off-campus, the lab’s safety principles follow. That’s true even in the high mountain passes of Washington and Oregon, where ORNL scientists are tracking a tree species — and where wildfires have become more frequent and widespread.

Students gather at a poster session

Purdue University hosted more than 100 attendees at the fourth annual Quantum Science Center summer school. Students and early-career members of the QSC —headquartered at ORNL — participated in lectures, hands-on workshops, poster sessions and panel discussions alongside colleagues from other DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Centers. 

Woman with dark brown hair, glasses wearing a green shirt underneath a black blazer jacket smiling for a photo in front of blue backdrop

Erin Webb, lead for the Bioresources Science and Engineering group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers — the society’s highest honor. 

Two green oak leaves with other matter in two circles above them. To the right, a yellow blob. To the left, a brown material inside a bowl.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists ingeniously created a sustainable, soft material by combining rubber with woody reinforcements and incorporating “smart” linkages between the components that unlock on demand.

Green, two-story house is being assembled with the help of a yellow crane.

Building innovations from ORNL will be on display in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall June 7 to June 9, 2024, during the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Innovation Housing Showcase. For the first time, ORNL’s real-time building evaluator was demonstrated outside of a laboratory setting and deployed for building construction. 

Man in blue shirt and grey pants holds laptop and poses next to a green plant in a lab.

John Lagergren, a staff scientist in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Plant Systems Biology group, is using his expertise in applied math and machine learning to develop neural networks to quickly analyze the vast amounts of data on plant traits amassed at ORNL’s Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory.

Two robotic arms, one on the left side of the frame and one on the right  - are pointing at a brown three pronged shape on a table. There are people in the background looking at this setup.

Momentum for manufacturing innovation in the United States got a boost during the inaugural MDF Innovation Days, held recently at the U.S. Department of Energy Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

With support from the Quantum Science Center, a multi-institutional research team analyzed the potential of particles that show promise for quantum applications. Credit: Pixabay

A team of researchers including a member of the Quantum Science Center at ORNL has published a review paper on the state of the field of Majorana research. The paper primarily describes four major platforms that are capable of hosting these particles, as well as the progress made over the past decade in this area.

ORNL researcher Felicia Gilliland loads experiment samples into position for the newly installed UR5E robotic arm at the BIO-SANS instrument. The industrial-grade robot changes samples automatically, reducing the need for human assistance and improving sample throughput. Credit: Jeremy Rumsey/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The BIO-SANS instrument, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s High Flux Isotope Reactor, is the latest neutron scattering instrument to be retrofitted with state-of-the-art robotics and custom software. The sophisticated upgrade quadruples the number of samples the instrument can measure automatically and significantly reduces the need for human assistance.

The Linac Coherent Light Source at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California reveals the structural dynamics of atoms and molecules through X-ray snapshots at ultrafast timescales. Pictured here is the LCLS-II tunnel. Credit: Jim Gensheimer/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Plans to unite the capabilities of two cutting-edge technological facilities funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science promise to usher in a new era of dynamic structural biology. Through DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure, or IRI, initiative, the facilities will complement each other’s technologies in the pursuit of science despite being nearly 2,500 miles apart.