Feature Articles

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a new detection system that allows home energy auditors to see air leaking from a building in real time with the help of a camera. It’s an advancement that could provide more accurate readings far more quickly than current diagnostic tools allow.

Rare isotope oxygen-28 has been determined to be "barely unbound" by experiments led by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and by computer simulations conducted at ORNL. The findings from this first-ever observation of 28O answer a longstanding question in nuclear physics: can you get bound isotopes in a very neutron-rich region of the nuclear chart, where instability and radioactivity are the norm?

Nearly 100 interns were introduced to Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s biological and environmental research over the summer of 2023 as mentors and students were eager to share knowledge and skills to address the nation’s energy and environmental challenges.

Featured in the1995 James Bond film, “GoldenEye," the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was the largest radio telescope in the world until December 1, 2020, when its cable wires slipped and caused the 1.8-million-pound platform to collapse onto the dish. Neutron imaging on some of the failed cable sockets was performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help determine the cause of the cable/socket assembly failures.

A group at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory made a difference for local youth through hands-on projects that connected neutron science and engineering intuitively. Two members of ORNL's Women in Neutron Sciences, or WiNS, designed the projects as part of the group's outreach mission promoting equitable and inclusive access to education for science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

Using the full capabilities of the Quantinuum H1-1 quantum computer, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory not only demonstrated best practices for scientific computing on current quantum systems but also produced an intriguing scientific result.

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.