Jack Orebaugh, a forensic anthropology major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a big heart for families with missing loved ones. When someone disappears in an area of dense vegetation, search and recovery efforts can be difficult, especially when a missing person’s last location is unknown. Recognizing the agony of not knowing what happened to a family or friend, Orebaugh decided to use his internship at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to find better ways to search for lost and deceased people using cameras and drones.
From materials science and earth system modeling to quantum information science and cybersecurity, experts in many fields run simulations and conduct experiments to collect the abundance of data necessary for scientific progress.
Each year, approximately 6 billion gallons of fuel are wasted as vehicles wait at stop lights or sit in dense traffic with engines idling, according to US Department of Energy estimates.
A typhoon strikes an island in the Pacific Ocean, downing power lines and cell towers. An earthquake hits a remote mountainous region, destroying structures and leaving no communication infrastructure behind.
Mircea Podar has travelled around the world and to the bottom of the ocean in pursuit of scientific discoveries, but it is the uncharted territory he encounters when working with new microbes that inspires his research at ORNL.