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Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are sharing computational resources and expertise to improve the detail and performance of a scientific application code that is the product of one of the world's largest collaborations of climate researchers. The Community Earth System Model couples components of atmosphere, land, ocean, and ice to reflect their complex interactions. By continuing to improve science representations and numerical methods in simulations, and exploiting modern computer architectures, researchers expect to further improve the CESM's accuracy in predicting climate changes.

Aa team led by Iowa State University physicist James Vary used Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility resources to predict the behavior of fluorine-14, a relatively unknown isotope. It published its predictions in Physical Review C in February 2010. Six months later, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University's Cyclotron Institute performed an experiment producing fluorine-14, and the results nearly mirrored those of Vary's group.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer has completed the first phase of an upgrade that will keep it among the most powerful scientific computing systems in the world.

Solar cells, light emitting diodes, displays and other electronic devices could get a bump in performance because of a discovery at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory that establishes new boundaries for controlling band gaps.

Researchers at the Bio-SANS instrument at the High Flux Isotope Reactor used contrast variation and small-angle neutron scattering to get a first insight into how macromolecules form single polyelectrolyte chains in synthetic complexes. Several recent papers describe how Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Yuri Melnichenko and his collaborators continue to use neutrons and small-angle neutron scattering to bore through geological materials.

Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla used the computing power of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, America's fastest, to study the effects of adding oxygen, sulfur and hydrogen to nanoribbons made of boron nitride. An upgrade is transforming Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, America's fastest, into Titan, a next-generation supercomputer that will employ the latest AMD Opteron central processing units as well as NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units -- energy-efficient processors that accelerate specific types of calculations in scientific application codes.

Studies of bacteria first found in Yellowstone's hot springs are furthering efforts at the Department of Energy's BioEnergy Science Center toward commercially viable ethanol production from crops such as switchgrass.

Steven J. Zinkle, a senior materials researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.