Research lab
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a US Department of Energy national lab in Tennessee researching nuclear science, materials science, and energy technologies.
ORNL says its 3D-printed composite forms cut lead time for specialized nuclear concrete molds from about six months to about two weeks. The forms are in full-scale demonstration on the Oak Ridge campus where Kairos Power is building its Hermes reactor.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory built Motor Decide, which ranks electric motor technologies under copper and rare-earth supply scenarios. The coverage so far rests on the lab's press release and does not name a manufacturer that has used it.
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DOE awarded $159 million to 12 Phase II Genesis Mission projects, bringing the Phase II total to 14. The awards go to project teams, and the report does not say what any cloud provider will be paid.
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Penn State-led researchers report an oxide thin film whose chemical disorder produces complex magnetic properties, in Advanced Materials. The authors say it could support faster, lower-power electronics and plan to take it to industry.
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NVIDIA committed $1 billion over five years and announced seven national-lab systems, led by Argonne's Solstice with around 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. Solstice targets AI work at 4 to 16 bits, so labs that need double precision are left weighing emulation against native FP64 hardware.
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ORNL researchers say their AI worked more than 25 hours without a human operator to assemble a 37-molecule artificial graphene lattice. The result puts software in charge of the physical moves inside an experiment, at a pace of about 1.5 molecules an hour.
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NASA sent 12 student-built heat-shield test capsules down with a trash-filled Cygnus XL cargo ship that breaks apart on its planned reentry. The capsules eject during the breakup, so Moon and Mars materials still in development get flight data without a launch of their own.
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A University of Regina group took a fractured Tyrannosaurus rex rib to two neutron instruments at Oak Ridge in April 2026, six years after X-ray scans first found soft tissue inside it, and the lab describes the neutron result as confirmation.
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Yale chemists checked hydride placements in one open-shell cobalt crystal against a neutron structure, and the microcrystal electron diffractometer came closest. The comparison rests on that single compound.
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Oak Ridge is engineering spore surfaces to bind neodymium and dysprosium in Appalachian mine water, where those metals are dilute. The pilot's main output was the assay needed to tell one engineered design from another.
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Oak Ridge chemists report cracking polyethylene into gasoline-range fuel below 200 degrees Celsius, using commercially available aluminium chloride salts that need no noble metal and no added hydrogen to work.
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Oak Ridge's STAR Lab tests sulfide solid-state and sulfur chemistries as complete cells, because the particle gaps, interface reactions and swelling that kill them do not appear in a materials test. Its results are scored against USABC metrics.
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LandScan Mosaic estimates people from building height, floor count and use type, with machine learning filling the gaps in sparse regions. ORNL says it is the first globally available population release to publish confidence measures.
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Natura Resources says it now holds the coolant for its MSR-1 demonstration reactor, shipped from Oak Ridge through Idaho National Laboratory to the Abilene Christian University site on September 18. It won the material in a DOE competition.
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Oak Ridge's dataset uses building height, floor count and use type to place people across a 24-hour average, and it reports how confident it is in each estimate. For siting work, that confidence figure matters as much as the count.
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Oak Ridge's detector straps onto a ventilation duct and samples once a minute on battery, or once a second when it is wired over Power over Ethernet. The crystal that makes it cheap costs a dollar or two.
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Labeled atomic force microscopy images are scarce, so an Oak Ridge team simulated the drift, noise and tip artifacts that operators fight every day, then tested whether models trained on the simulation find real features in real scans.
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Diego Alzate-Sanchez and Jenna Kin swapped a hydrogel's permanent crosslinks for imine boronic esters. The same reversible bonds that start closing a cut within minutes let acidity take the network back to its components.
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The 15.2 terawatt-hour total is the line that travels, but the usable part is HydroGenerate, downloadable and pointed at one dam, sizing a turbine to the water an operator is already obliged to pass.
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Twelve pennycress lines, 360 plants and more than 24,000 camera observations went into a nickel screen whose analysis now takes minutes, though the accumulation figures that would make phytomining a supply story sit outside the release.
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Science · August 26, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers