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Parans Paranthaman received the ORNL Director's Award for Outstanding Individual Accomplishment in Science and Technology at ORNL's Awards Night for his efforts in mentoring and developing future scientists..

The Director’s Awards were presented by ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia during Saturday night’s annual Awards Night event hosted by UT-Battelle, the management and operating contractor of ORNL for the Department of Energy.

After studying the mixture of lead titanate and strontium titanate with x-ray diffraction imaging, the research team used machine learning techniques to identify two different phases at the nanoscale level: ferroelectric-ferroelastic (red, A) and polarization vortices (blue, V).

Beyond solids, liquids, gases, plasma, and other examples only accessible under extreme conditions, scientists are constantly searching for other states of matter.

SNS researchers

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have new experimental evidence and a predictive theory that solves a long-standing materials science mystery: why certain crystalline materials shrink when heated.

Elizabeth Herndon takes a soil sample at a field site outside Abisko, Sweden in July 2019.

Elizabeth Herndon believes in going the distance whether she is preparing to compete in the 2020 Olympic marathon trials or examining how metals move through the environment as a geochemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

CellSight allows for rapid mass spectrometry of individual cells. Credit: John Cahill, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/U.S. Dept of Energy

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have received five 2019 R&D 100 Awards, increasing the lab’s total to 221 since the award’s inception in 1963.

Misha Krassovski, a computer scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, stands in front of the Polarstern, a 400-foot long German icebreaker. Krassovski lived aboard the Polarstern during the first leg of the MOSAiC mission, the largest polar expedition ever. Credit: Misha Krassovski/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

In the vast frozen whiteness of the central Arctic, the Polarstern, a German research vessel, has settled into the ice for a yearlong float.

ORNL researcher Chengyun Hua explains chemical elements to Leah Pitts, 9, and her sister Madeline, 6, as their mother, Shayne looks on. The Pittses are part of Pack 50 in the Karns area of Knoxville.

Scouts from around East Tennessee learned about supercomputing, electricity, isotopes, physics, and much more at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s final Traveling Science Fair event of 2019

Background image represents the cobalt oxide structure Goodenough demonstrated could produce four volts of electricity with intercalated lithium ions. This early research led to energy storage and performance advances in myriad electronic applications. Credit: Jill Hemman/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Two of the researchers who share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry announced Wednesday—John B. Goodenough of the University of Texas at Austin and M. Stanley Whittingham of Binghamton University in New York—have research ties to ORNL.

Snapshot of total temperature distribution at supersonic speed of mach 2.4. Total temperature allows the team to visualize the extent of the exhaust plumes as the temperature of the plumes is much greater than that of the surrounding atmosphere. Credit: NASA

The type of vehicle that will carry people to the Red Planet is shaping up to be “like a two-story house you’re trying to land on another planet. 

Amy Elliott

Amy Elliott, an engineer and researcher studying additive manufacturing at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been selected as one of 125 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) IF/THEN Ambassadors.