Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Four major US national laboratories have worked together to develop a computer model to help airport authorities screen passengers for pandemic influenza. The tool can help estimate false negatives, people with influenza who slip through the screening process, and so assess the risk of infected passengers unknowingly spreading disease across the nation.
NEW ORLEANS (April 17, 2009) -- Secondhand tobacco smoke and smoke from cooking oil and wood smoke affected cardiovascular function of men and women who were exposed to small doses of the smoke for as little as 10 minutes, according to a study from the University of Kentucky.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 3, 2009 -- By identifying a novel compound that primes a plant's immune system, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Chicago may be on a path to developing disease-resistant plants.
COLLEGE PARK, MD (Mar 12, 2009) -- A group of researchers in Tennessee and Denmark has discovered a way to sensitively detect explosives based on the physical properties of their vapors.
The legacy of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy development has left ground water and sediment at dozens of sites across the United States and many more around the world contaminated with uranium. The uranium is transported through ground water as uranyl (U6+).
Intermetallics can withstand searing heat and are often lightweight. These properties intrigue the aerospace, defense, energy and automotive industries, which are experimenting with this class of materials in hopes of building high-performance jet engines, improved rocket motors and missile components, more efficient steam turbines and better car engine valves. Many intermetallics, however, break easily. These compounds are typically stronger than simple metals at high temperatures. Yet they are almost as fragile as ceramics at room temperature. This fragility limits their commercial use. But why do most intermetallics shatter? How can that be prevented?
Physical Review E has announced the publication of an article by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement.
Patients with cancers previously next to untreatable may have new hope because of a license agreement between Isotron of Norcross, Ga., and UT-Battelle, which manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The license allows Isotron to market a treatment called neutron brachytherapy, which enables physicians to deliver a highly concentrated dose of californium-252 neutrons to the site of a tumor instead of having to treat the tumor with conventional gamma rays, which often are not as effective at killing cancer cells. The benefit to patients should be tremendous.
An award-winning system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to clean up perchlorate pollution is now also helping scientists determine whether the contamination is natural or man-made. This latter application could be instrumental in tracking environmental perchlorate, finding its source and resolving resulting liability issues, said ORNL scientist Baohua Gu, who headed development of the treatment system. Perchlorate, or ClO4-, disrupts the thyroid gland that regulates metabolism in adults and physical development in children and is increasingly being found in soil and water. It is used to make solid rocket propellant and explosives but also occurs naturally, as in nitrate soils from Chile used to make fertilizers, making the source sometimes difficult to trace.
Researchers, using a state-of-the-art microscope and new computerized imaging technology, have pushed back the barrier of how small we can see--to a record, atom-scale 0.6 angstrom. Researchers obtained the improved resolution with ORNL's 300-kilovolt Z-contrast scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), aided by an emerging technology called aberration correction. The direct images have been acknowledged as proof of atom-scale resolution below one angstrom and provide researchers with a valuable tool for designing advanced materials.
Fundamental questions that particle physicists have pondered for decades might be answered when a $9.2 million neutron physics beam line is built at the Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source. At the core of physicists' excitement is the fact that the SNS will produce up to 100 times more neutrons than are produced by any comparable source in the world. Tapping in to those neutrons will be the Fundamental Neutron Physics beam line, which will help physicists exploit neutrons to learn more about the Big Bang, left-right symmetry of the universe and the amount of energy produced in the sun. Recently, the beam line project passed a milestone with the approval of the performance baseline -- known as Critical Decision 2.
An electricity meter that sometimes runs backwards is just one of the cool aspects of Department of Energy near-zero-energy homes. While low or no electric bills are an obvious benefit, high energy efficiency homes and businesses also reduce the amount of electricity that needs to be generated, thus reducing pollution, said Jeff Christian of DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
New atom-scale images from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory promise to provide researchers the ability to predict and model the properties and behavior of advanced ceramic materials. A new study describes research that would represent a valuable advantage in the development of strong and heat-resistant materials for a variety of applications. The work reveals, in world-record 0.7 angstrom resolution, the preferred location of atoms within a silicon nitride ceramic.
An international team of researchers say that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement. In this approach, called bubble fusion, the research team used a standing ultrasonic wave to help form and then implode the cavitation bubbles of deuterated acetone vapor. The oscillating sound waves caused the bubbles to expand and then violently collapse, creating strong compression shock waves around and inside the bubbles. Moving at about the speed of sound, the internal shock waves impacted at the center of the bubbles causing very high compression and accompanying temperatures of about 100 million Kelvin.
