Plants and other biomass can be converted into a variety of renewable high-value products including carbon fibers, plastics, and liquid fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel that are beneficial for reducing petroleum use and vehicle emissions. Breaking down plants in order to release...
Steady progress in the development of advanced materials has led to modern civilization’s foundational technologies—better batteries, resilient building materials and atom-scale semiconductors. Development of the next wave of materials, however, is being slowed by the sheer co...
Harvesting oil, mitigating subsurface contamination, and sequestering carbon emissions share a common thread—they deal with multiphase flows, or situations where materials are flowing close together in different states (solids, liquids, or gases) or when the flow is comprised ...
Single atoms or molecules imprisoned by laser light in a doughnut-shaped metal cage could unlock the key to advanced storage devices, computers and high-resolution instruments.
In a paper published in Physical Review A, a team composed of Ali Passian of the Depa...
Viruses are tiny—merely millionths of a millimeter in diameter—but what they lack in size, they make up in quantity.
A microscope being developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will allow scientists studying biological and synthetic materials to simultaneously observe chemical and physical properties on and beneath the surface.
Piranha, an award-winning intelligent agent-based technology to analyze text data with unprecedented speed and accuracy, will be showcased at the Smithsonian’s Innovation Festival Sept. 26-27. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology, which received an R&D 100 Award in 2007,...
Lightweight powertrain materials could play a hefty role in helping automakers meet stricter Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s supercomputer could accelerate their deployment. Working with industry, ORNL researchers are developing material...
Groundbreaking work at two Department of Energy national laboratories has confirmed plutonium’s magnetism, which scientists have long theorized but have never been able to experimentally observe. The advances that enabled the discovery hold great pro...
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a population distribution model that provides unprecedented county-level predictions of where people will live in the U.S. in the coming decades.