News

Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.

Ilenne Del Valle is merging her expertise in synthetic biology and environmental science to develop new technologies to help scientists better understand and engineer ecosystems for climate resilience. 

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

Jack Orebaugh, a forensic anthropology major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a big heart for families with missing loved ones. When someone disappears in an area of dense vegetation, search and recovery efforts can be difficult, especially when a missing person’s last location is unknown. Recognizing the agony of not knowing what happened to a family or friend, Orebaugh decided to use his internship at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to find better ways to search for lost and deceased people using cameras and drones. 

The 2023 top science achievements from HFIR and SNS feature a broad range of materials research published in high impact journals such as Nature and Advanced Materials.

Researchers at ORNL became the first to 3D-print large rotating steam turbine blades for generating energy in power plants.

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. 

Nuclear engineering students from the United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy are working with researchers at ORNL to complete design concepts for a nuclear propulsion rocket to go to space in 2027 as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DRACO program.

Scientists from Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are turning air into fertilizer without leaving a carbon footprint. Their discovery could deliver a much-needed solution to help meet worldwide carbon-neutral goals by 2050.

Four scientists affiliated with ORNL were named Battelle Distinguished Inventors during the lab’s annual Innovation Awards on Dec. 1 in recognition of being granted 14 or more United States patents.