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Virtual universes

Using Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a team led by Argonne National Laboratory ran three of the largest cosmological simulations known to date.

Small modular reactor computer simulation

In a step toward advancing small modular nuclear reactor designs, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have run reactor simulations on ORNL supercomputer Summit with greater-than-expected computational efficiency.

As part of a preliminary study, ORNL scientists used critical location data collected from Twitter to map the location of certain power outages across the United States.

Gleaning valuable data from social platforms such as Twitter—particularly to map out critical location information during emergencies— has become more effective and efficient thanks to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Nuclear—Deep space travel

By automating the production of neptunium oxide-aluminum pellets, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have eliminated a key bottleneck when producing plutonium-238 used by NASA to fuel deep space exploration.

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Thought leaders from across the maritime community came together at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to explore the emerging new energy landscape for the maritime transportation system during the Ninth Annual Maritime Risk Symposium.

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Physicists turned to the “doubly magic” tin isotope Sn-132, colliding it with a target at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assess its properties as it lost a neutron to become Sn-131.

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Biologists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have confirmed that microorganisms called methanogens can transform mercury into the neurotoxin methylmercury with varying efficiency across species.

Illustration of satellite in front of glowing orange celestial body

A shield assembly that protects an instrument measuring ion and electron fluxes for a NASA mission to touch the Sun was tested in extreme experimental environments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and passed with flying colors. Components aboard Parker Solar Probe, which will endure th...

ORNL’s Frank Combs and Michael Starr of the U.S. Armed Forces (driver) work in ORNL’s Vehicle Security Laboratory to evaluate a prototype device that can detect network intrusions in all modern vehicles. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

A new Oak Ridge National Laboratory-developed method promises to protect connected and autonomous vehicles from possible network intrusion. Researchers built a prototype plug-in device designed to alert drivers of vehicle cyberattacks. The prototype is coded to learn regular timing...

By wet-sieving stream sediment, (from left) Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Kenneth Lowe, Melanie Mayes and John Dickson sort sediment into different particle size in this stream near Rocky Top.

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study is providing an unprecedented watershed-scale understanding of mercury in soils and sediments. Researchers focused on evaluating mercury and soil properties along the banks of a mercury-contaminated stream in Oak Ridge, Tenn., sampling 145 loca...