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Mandy Mahoney, third from left, director of the DOE Office Of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Building Technologies Office, welcomed 21 students representing seven universities across the nation to the sixth annual JUMP into STEM finals competition at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Credit: Kurt Weiss/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Students with a focus on building science will spend 10 weeks this summer interning at ORNL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Pacific Northwest Laboratory as winners of the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Building Technologies Office sixth annual JUMP into STEM finals competition.

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study projects how geothermal heat pumps that derive heating and cooling from the ground would improve grid reliability and reduce costs and carbon emissions when widely deployed. Credit: Chad Malone, ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A modeling analysis led by ORNL gives the first detailed look at how geothermal energy can relieve the electric power system and reduce carbon emissions if widely implemented across the United States within the next few decades. 

Iridium-192 will be irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor at ORNL before being sent to QSA Global for processing.

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 Tomás Rush examines a culture as part of his research into the plant-fungus relationship that can help or hinder ecosystem health. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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

Louise Stevenson uses her expertise as an environmental toxicologist to evaluate the effects of stressors such as chemicals and other contaminants on aquatic systems. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept of Energy

Louise Stevenson uses her expertise as an environmental toxicologist to evaluate the effects of stressors such as chemicals and other contaminants on aquatic systems.

Symposium guests view posters in the poster competition. Credit: Laetitia Delmau/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The 21st 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.

Alex May, pictured above, is the first and only full-time data curator at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Credit: Carlos Jones and Wikimedia Commons, background/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Alex May is the first and only full-time data curator at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, evaluating datasets developed by computational scientists before they are made public through the OLCF’s Constellation portal for open data exchange.
Debjani Pal’s photo “Three-Dimensional Breast Cancer Spheroids” won the Director’s Choice Award in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Art of Science photo competition. It will be displayed at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Credit: Debjani Pal/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
“Three-Dimensional Breast Cancer Spheroids” submitted by radiotherapeutics researcher Debjani Pal is stunning. Brilliant blue dots pop from an electric sphere threaded with bright colors: greens, aqua, hot pink and red.
The AI agent, incorporating a language model-based molecular generator and a graph neural network-based molecular property predictor, processes a set of user-provided molecules (green) and produces/suggests new molecules (red) with desired chemical/physical properties (i.e. excitation energy). Image credit: Pilsun You, Jason Smith/ORNL, U.S. DOE

A team of computational scientists at ORNL has generated and released datasets of unprecedented scale that provide the ultraviolet visible spectral properties of over 10 million organic molecules. 

ORNL researchers contributed biomass resources analysis to a new report that says carbon dioxide removal targets can be reached by 2050 using existing technology. Source: Jason Richards/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Scientists from more than a dozen institutions have completed a first-of-its-kind high-resolution assessment of carbon dioxide removal potential in the United States, charting a path to achieve a net-zero greenhouse gas economy by 2050.