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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.

Researchers using the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's can foresee substantial changes in scientific application code development. The OLCF's new supercomputer, Titan, will use a hybrid architecture of conventional, multipurpose CPUs and high-performance GPUs. The machine will supplant the OLCF's current fastest supercomputer, Jaguar, a Cray XT5 using an entirely CPU-based platform. Members of the OLCF's Application Performance Tools group understand the challenge. Their goal is to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Envirofit International, the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Colorado State University have won a Federal Laboratory Consortium award for excellence in technology transfer for a clean-burning cookstove designed for the developing world.

By using a novel technique to better understand mineral growth and dissolution, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are improving predictions of mineral reactions and laying the groundwork for applications ranging from keeping oil pipes clear to sequestering radium.