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ORNL’s Jack Cahill, Eugene Dumitrescu, Dan Lu, Takaaki Koyanagi and Matthew Brahlek have been selected to receive Department of Energy Early Career Research awards. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

Since its inception in 2010, the program bolsters national scientific discovery by supporting early career researchers in fields pertaining to the Office of Science.

Biopsy from the tubular esophagus showing incomplete intestinal metaplasia, goblet cells with interposed cells having gastric foveolar-type mucin consistent with Barrett esophagus. Negative for dysplasia. H&E stain. Credit: Creative Commons

A team including researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a digital tool to better monitor a condition known as Barrett’s esophagus, which affects more than 3 million people in the United States.

Urban climate modeling

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have identified a statistical relationship between the growth of cities and the spread of paved surfaces like roads and sidewalks. These impervious surfaces impede the flow of water into the ground, affecting the water cycle and, by extension, the climate.

Computing—Routing out the bugs

A study led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory explored the interface between the Department of Veterans Affairs’ healthcare data system and the data itself to detect the likelihood of errors and designed an auto-surveillance tool

After a monolayer MXene is heated, functional groups are removed from both surfaces. Titanium and carbon atoms migrate from one area to both surfaces, creating a pore and forming new structures. Credit: ORNL, USDOE; image by Xiahan Sang and Andy Sproles.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory induced a two-dimensional material to cannibalize itself for atomic “building blocks” from which stable structures formed. The findings, reported in Nature Communications, provide insights that ...

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The probe of an atomic force microscope (AFM) scans a surface to reveal details at a resolution 1,000 times greater than that of an optical microscope. That makes AFM the premier tool for analyzing physical features, but it cannot tell scientists anything about chemistry. For that they turn to the mass spectrometer (MS).
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With more than 30 patents, James Klett is no stranger to success, but perhaps the Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher’s most noteworthy achievement didn’t start out so hot – or so it seemed at the time.

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From the bluebird painting propped against her office wall and the deer she mentions seeing outside her office window, Linda Lewis might be mistaken for a wildlife biologist at first glance. But rather than trailing animal tracks, Lewis, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is more interested in marks left behind by humans.

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Less than 1 percent of Earth’s water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.

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Graphene, a strong, lightweight carbon honeycombed structure that’s only one atom thick, holds great promise for energy research and development. Recently scientists with the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures, and Transport (FIRST) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC), led by the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, revealed graphene can serve as a proton-selective permeable membrane, providing a new basis for streamlined and more efficient energy technologies such as improved fuel cells.