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ORNL intern Jack Orebaugh holds the drone used in his research to help locate human remains. Credit: Lena Shoemaker/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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. 

Andrew Harter, pictured, and fellow ORNL staff members formed Horizon31 to build a set of products and services that provide customized unmanned vehicle control systems. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Horizon31, LLC has exclusively licensed a novel communication system that allows users to reliably operate unmanned vehicles such as drones from anywhere in the world using only an internet connection.

The CrossVis application includes a parallel coordinates plot (left), a tiled image view (right) and other interactive data views. Credit: Chad Steed/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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.

ORNL scientists are currently using Proto-MPEX to perform necessary research and development that is needed to build MPEX. Credit: Genevieve Martin/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Temperatures hotter than the center of the sun. Magnetic fields hundreds of thousands of times stronger than the earth’s. Neutrons energetic enough to change the structure of a material entirely.

Dalton Lunga

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.