Feature Articles

Wildfires have shaped the environment for millennia, but they are increasing in frequency, range and intensity in response to a hotter climate. The phenomenon is being incorporated into high-resolution simulations of the Earth’s climate by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a mission to better understand and predict environmental change.

Through an intelligent combination of geotagged social media, global location and natural language data, ORNL’s Junchuan Fan and Gautam Thakur developed MapSpace, a publicly available, scalable land-use modeling framework. By providing data characteristics broader and deeper than satellite imagery alone, MapSpace can generate population analytics invaluable for urban planning and disaster response. The researchers’ findings were published in the International Journal of Digital Earth.

Research into a new, unique technology to fabricate composite metal parts for a wide range of applications operating in extreme environments across the aviation, space and energy industries is showing promise for additive manufacturing.

The International Standards Organization has put its stamp of approval on 18 nuclear analytical chemistry methods at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These testing and calibration methods have received ISO 17025 accreditation. “Accreditation serves DOE missions in environmental stewardship, isotope production and nuclear security,” said Joe Giaquinto, head of ORNL’s Nuclear Analytical Chemistry section.

Over the past decade, teams of engineers, chemists and biologists have analyzed the physical and chemical properties of cicada wings, hoping to unlock the secret of their ability to kill microbes on contact. If this function of nature can be replicated by science, it may lead to products with inherently antibacterial surfaces that are more effective than current chemical treatments.

The third iteration of the GeoAI leadership gathering focused on combining and scaling the many methods required to visualize and understand the Earth’s surface and how humans interact with it.

Accurately predicting subseasonal weather conditions can help communities better prepare for emergency response in the event of strong storms or unprecedented flooding. This subseasonal to seasonal prediction capability is of particular interest to agencies such as the Air Force Weather, or AFW, program, which relies on accurate predictions to conduct missions safely and effectively around the world. In 2021, the AFW and ORNL launched two HPE Cray EX supercomputers, named Fawbush and Miller, to provide a platform for advanced weather modeling and prediction.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have developed a method to simplify one step of radioisotope production — and it’s faster and safer.

For fusion energy, scientists must generate, confine and sustain a superhot gas called plasma — heated to 10 times the temperature of the center of the sun — to cause a fusion reaction. Although terrestrial plasmas can be confined magnetically, what materials can withstand near such high temperatures and the relentless impact of energetic neutrons? That question is central to the development of economical fusion power plants to provide abundant and carbon-free energy. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been working with Japanese scientists under the Japan-U.S. Fusion Cooperation Program for decades to determine the answer.

Ken Herwig’s career spanning two-and-a-half decades at ORN includes designing, building and rebuilding scientific instruments used to study the behavior of particles—including SNS’s first instrument, named BASIS.