News

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.

ORNL scientists and researchers attended the annual American Geophysical Union meeting and came away inspired for the year ahead in geospatial, earth and climate science. 

A key industrial isotope, iridium-192, has not been produced in the U.S. in almost 20 years. DOE's Isotope Program and QSA Global Inc. announced a joint product development agreement to initiate U.S. production of iridium-192. 

ORNL’s Janet Meier won the Energy Security category of the U.S. Department of Energy’s inaugural National Lab Research SLAM on Capitol Hill.

New computational framework speeds discovery of fungal metabolites, key to plant health and used in drug therapies and for other uses. 
 

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. 

The 21^st Symposium on Separation Science and Technology for Energy Applications, Oct. 23-26 at the Embassy Suites by Hilton West in Knoxville, attracted 109 researchers, including some from Austria and the Czech Republic. Besides attending many technical sessions, they had the opportunity to tour the Graphite Reactor, High Flux Isotope Reactor and both supercomputers at ORNL.

The 2023 top science achievements from HFIR and SNS feature a broad range of materials research published in high impact journals such as Nature and Advanced Materials.

Scientists at ORNL have developed a technique for recovering and recycling critical materials that has garnered special recognition from a peer-reviewed materials journal and received a new phase of funding for research and development.

Researchers at ORNL became the first to 3D-print large rotating steam turbine blades for generating energy in power plants.