A first-ever dataset bridging molecular information about the poplar tree microbiome to ecosystem-level processes has been released by a team of DOE scientists led by ORNL. The project aims to inform research regarding how natural systems function, their vulnerability to a changing climate and ultimately how plants might be engineered for better performance as sources of bioenergy and natural carbon storage.
Alyssa Carrell started her science career studying the tallest inhabitants in the forest, but today is focused on some of its smallest — the microbial organisms that play an outsized role in plant health.
College intern Noah Miller is on his 3rd consecutive internship at ORNL, currently working on developing an automated pellet inspection system for Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Plutonium-238 Supply Program. Along with his success at ORNL, Miller is also focusing on becoming a mentor for kids, giving back to the place where he discovered his passion and developed his skills.
The United States could triple its current bioeconomy by producing more than 1 billion tons per year of plant-based biomass for renewable fuels, while meeting projected demands for food, feed, fiber, conventional forest products and exports, according to the DOE’s latest Billion-Ton Report led by ORNL.
Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.
New computational framework speeds discovery of fungal metabolites, key to plant health and used in drug therapies and for other uses.
In summer 2023, ORNL's Prasanna Balaprakash was invited to speak at a roundtable discussion focused on the importance of academic artificial intelligence research and development hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Gina Tourassi has been appointed as director of the National Center for Computational Sciences, a division of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Illustration of the optimized zeolite catalyst, or NbAlS-1, which enables a highly efficient chemical reaction to create butene, a renewable source of energy, without expending high amounts of energy for the conversion. Credit: Jill Hemman, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/U.S. Dept. of Energy
A technology developed at the ORNL and scaled up by Vertimass LLC to convert ethanol into fuels suitable for aviation, shipping and other heavy-duty applications can be price-competitive with conventional fuels