News

Growing up exploring the parklands of India where Rudyard Kipling drew inspiration for The Jungle Book left Saubhagya Rathore with a deep respect and curiosity about the natural world. He later turned that interest into a career in environmental science and engineering, and today he is working at ORNL to improve our understanding of watersheds for better climate prediction and resilience.

Tristen Mullins enjoys the hidden side of computers. As a signals processing engineer for ORNL, she tries to uncover information hidden in components used on the nation’s power grid — information that may be susceptible to cyberattacks.

Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.

An advance in a topological insulator material — whose interior behaves like an electrical insulator but whose surface behaves like a conductor — could revolutionize the fields of next-generation electronics and quantum computing, according to scientists at ORNL.

ORNL will team up with six of eight companies that are advancing designs and research and development for fusion power plants with the mission to achieve a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade.

When reading the novel Jurassic Park as a teenager, Jerry Parks found the passages about gene sequencing and supercomputers fascinating, but never imagined he might someday pursue such futuristic-sounding science.

Led by Kelly Chipps of ORNL, scientists working in the lab have produced a signature nuclear reaction that occurs on the surface of a neutron star gobbling mass from a companion star. Their achievement improves understanding of stellar processes generating diverse nuclear isotopes.

Nature-based solutions are an effective tool to combat climate change triggered by rising carbon emissions, whether it’s by clearing the skies with bio-based aviation fuels or boosting natural carbon sinks.

Kelly Chipps, a nuclear astrophysicist at ORNL, has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC. The committee provides official advice to DOE and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, about issues relating to the national program for basic nuclear science research.

Growing up in China, Yue Yuan stood beneath the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, built to harness the world’s third-longest river. Her father brought her to Three Gorges Dam every year as it was being constructed across the Yangtze River so she could witness its progress.