Skip to main content
ORNL Image
With leaves taking on more golden hues, trees skirting the drive to the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in northeastern Tennessee are beginning to show the first signs of fall. A few even look like they’ve closed shop for winter early, already having shed all their leaves.
ORNL Image
About 30 students ages 9 through 14 are gearing up for the 2014-15 FIRST LEGO League competition with weekly training sessions at the National Transportation Research Center (NTRC) in West Knoxville.
ORNL Image
A team led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unlocked the enzymatic synthesis process of rare sugars, which are useful in developing drugs with low side effects using a process more friendly to the environment.
ORNL Image
The largest power outage in United States history, the 2003 Northeast blackout, began with one power line in Ohio going offline and ended with more than 50 million people without power throughout the Northeast and the Canadian province of Ontario.
ORNL Image
Scientific research may be the primary focus of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, but for David Mandrus, the institutions play an equally important role in shaping the instruction and career paths of students.
ORNL Image

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first team to sequence the entire genome of the Clostridium autoethanogenum bacterium, which is used to sustainably produce fuel and chemicals from a range of raw materials, including gases derived from biomass and industrial wastes.

Automated calibration software for building efficiency studies, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Jibonananda Sanyal (left) and Joshua New, is now available as an open source code.
There are many ways to save energy in residential and commercial buildings. There are products that use less energy for lighting, heating and cooling; materials that better insulate and seal building envelopes; and architectural and engineering designs that lower utility bills through efficient use of space and renewable energy.
Default image of ORNL entry sign
Complex oxides have long tantalized the materials science community for their promise in next-generation energy and information technologies. Complex oxide crystals combine oxygen atoms with assorted metals to produce unusual and very desirable properties.
Default image of ORNL entry sign
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is one of eight Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories that will use high-performance computing (HPC) to develop the most sophisticated Earth system model to date for climate change research with scientific and energy applications.
ORNL Image
If you were to do an internet search for what causes engine knock, you’d receive a number of answers. Ramanan Sankaran—a scientific computing specialist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and joint faculty member at the University of Tennessee—wants to take Titan through the fuel lines to help identify the right one.