Feature Articles

Using disinformation to create political instability and battlefield confusion dates back millennia. However, today’s disinformation actors use social media to amplify disinformation that users knowingly or, more often, unknowingly perpetuate. Such disinformation spreads quickly, threatening public health and safety. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic and recent global elections have given the world a front-row seat to this form of modern warfare. A group at ORNL now studies such threats thanks to the evolution at the lab of location intelligence, or research that uses open data to understand places and the factors that influence human activity in them. In the past, location intelligence has informed emergency response, urban planning, transportation planning, energy conservation and policy decisions. Now, location intelligence at ORNL also helps identify disinformation, or shared information that is intentionally misleading, and its impacts.

As a Distinguished Staff Fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division focused on energy storage and conversion, Andrew Ullman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory is using chemistry to devise a better battery.

Andrea Delgado, a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is using quantum computing to help investigate the fundamental building blocks of the universe and to see whether there are particles yet to be found.

NASA scientists are using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study moon rocks collected from the Apollo space missions. The samples are made of dust and rock fragments that combined and struck the moon's surface possibly billions of years ago. As plans to travel to Mars progress, insights into the rocks could reveal more about the formation of the solar system and where water might be found on the moon.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are helping modernize power management and enhance reliability in an increasingly complex electric grid. As the United States transitions to cleaner energy and more U.S. consumers adopt electric vehicles, the grid is facing new power flow demands. ORNL researchers are tackling this challenge by creating a new architecture to modernize the grid from the bottom up, starting with consumers and expanding to the entire power distribution system. A cornerstone of this architecture is a new power electronics technology suite called a Smart Universal Power Electronics Regulator, or SUPER.

Brenden Ortiz, a Wigner Distinguished Staff Fellow at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is helping design the next generation of quantum materials.

A tool developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers gives building owners and equipment manufacturers and installers an easy way to calculate the cost savings of a heating and cooling system that utilizes geothermal energy and emits no carbon.

Chemist Jeff Foster is looking for ways to control sequencing in polymers that could result in designer molecules to benefit a variety of industries, including medicine and energy. Using the technology that he and his colleagues are developing, “scientists can begin to understand how the sequence of monomers influences the behavior and properties of synthetic polymer materials,” said Foster, an Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Alice Perrin, a materials scientist and Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, focuses her fellowship research on microstructural changes in nanocrystalline iron and tungsten alloys, which could result in new strategies for material design that resists the detrimental effects of radiation.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have confirmed that bacteria-killing viruses called bacteriophages deploy a sneaky tactic when targeting their hosts: They use a standard genetic code when invading bacteria, then switch to an alternate code at later stages of infection.