Quantum Science Center summer school draws record attendance
Using nondestructive neutron scattering techniques, scientists are examining how single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria produce oxygen and obtain energy through photosynthesis.
The same fusion reactions that power the sun also occur inside a tokamak, a device that uses magnetic fields to confine and control plasmas of 100-plus million degrees. Under extreme temperatures and pressure, hydrogen atoms can fuse together, creating new helium atoms and simulta...
After more than a year of operation at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the COHERENT experiment, using the world’s smallest neutrino detector, has found a big fingerprint of the elusive, electrically neutral particles that interact only weakly with matter.
Researchers used neutrons to probe a running engine at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source
For more than 50 years, scientists have debated what turns particular oxide insulators, in which electrons barely move, into metals, in which electrons flow freely.
Bio-SANS, the Biological Small-Angle Neutron Scattering Instrument at HFIR recently had a detector upgrade that will provide significantly improved performance that is more in line with the instrument’s capability.
We now know that many serious diseases have genetic links that a geneticist can find by reading an individual’s genome─the DNA double helix where our organism’s hereditary information is encoded. Researchers know too that a particular protein protects our DNA, which is vulnerable to entanglement when its information is read and to attack from enzymes that damage the strands, making the code indecipherable.
Researchers at the Bio-SANS instrument at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) used small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to get a first insight into the conformation of single polyelectrolyte chains in large pieces of the synthetic complex. The research pursues applications for replacement of intervertebral discs in the spine and of knee cartilage.
Researchers have long thought that formation of insoluble fibrous “strings” of self-assembling proteins might be involved in the progression of a number of diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. However, recent evidence suggests that aggregates that develop at an earlier stage than fibril formation, and accumulate in human organs, may be the primary toxic agents.