Science Archives - Oak Ridge Today

Tonight: Learn about microplastics in Tennessee River

Posted at 8:04 am June 6, 2019
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

You can learn about water quality and microplastics in the Tennessee River during a meeting in Oak Ridge tonight (Thursday, June 6).

The program is scheduled to start at 7 p.m. Thursday at the University of Tennessee Arboretum Auditorium. It’s a free program offered by the UT Arboretum Society and co-sponsored by Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning. No registration is required.

Microplastics have been in the news recently, a press release said. Martin Knoll, a professor of geology and hydrology at Sewanee: The University of the South, will explain why microplastics are an issue, and he will present his findings on the water quality of the Tennessee River during the program this evening.

As project manager for the Tenneswim in 2016, Knoll directed the most detailed analysis of Tennessee River water quality ever conducted, the press release said. During this project, Knoll and his colleagues found the highest levels of microplastics recorded in any river of the world to date.

[Read more…]

Secret City Wildbots alliance wins Smoky Mountains Regionals robotics tournament

Posted at 7:12 pm April 1, 2019
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The Secret City Wildbots, Team 4265, won the Smoky Mountains Regionals robotics tournament on Saturday, March 30, 2019, as captains of the fourth-seeded alliance, along with alliance partners 2614 Mars of Morgantown, W.V., and 2556 RadioActive Roaches of Niceville, Fla. The win secures a place in the World Championship at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas, from April 17-20. (Photo by Angi Agle)

Photos, video, and information submitted by Angi Agle

The Secret City Wildbots, Team 4265, won the Smoky Mountains Regionals robotics tournament on Saturday as captains of the fourth-seeded alliance. Their alliance partners were 2614 Mars of Morgantown, West Virginia, and 2556 RadioActive Roaches of Niceville, Florida.

The win secures a place in the World Championship at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas, from April 17-20.

The Wildbots’ alliance remained undefeated until the second match of the finals, racking up two matches with the event high score of 95 in the elimination rounds. The tiebreaker match was won 90-83. [Read more…]

UT Arboretum Society has spring wildflower walk on Saturday, April 13

Posted at 12:25 pm March 22, 2019
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

The University of Tennessee Arboretum Society will have a meet and greet followed by a spring wildflower walk at Haw Ridge Park on Saturday, May 5, 2018. Kris Light, an expert naturalist, educator, and photographer, will lead this fun, educational, and easy walk, a press release said. (Submitted photo)

The University of Tennessee Arboretum Society will have a meet and greet followed by a spring wildflower walk at Haw Ridge Park on Saturday, April 13, 2019. Kris Light, an expert naturalist, educator, and photographer, will lead this fun, educational, and easy walk, a press release said. (Submitted file photo)

The University of Tennessee Arboretum Society will have a meet-and-greet followed by a spring wildflower walk on Saturday, April 13. The event is scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. at Haw Ridge Park on Edgemoor Road in Oak Ridge.

Participants are asked to meet at the parking lot, which is at the west end of the park next to the kiosk, near the Soccer Trail, a press release said. The walk is free and open to the public. Kris Light—an expert naturalist, educator, and photographer—will lead this fun, educational, and easy walk, the press release said.

Participants may want to bring a camera to take pictures of the many wildflowers on the grounds. If participants have a wildflower book, Kris suggests bringing that as well, the release said. [Read more…]

UT Arboretum Society presents history of CRESO on March 28

Posted at 10:41 am March 19, 2019
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

John Byrd of CRESO (Submitted photo)

The University of Tennessee Arboretum Society will sponsor a talk by the Clinch River Environmental Studies Organization, or CRESO, on Thursday, March 28, at the UT Arboretum Auditorium.

The talk is scheduled from 7 to 8 p.m. March 28. The UT Arboretum is at 901 South Illinois Avenue in Oak Ridge.

John Byrd, principal investigator with CRESO, and Fred Holtzclaw are retired high school biology teachers, a press release said. [Read more…]

A former Oak Ridge student, artificial intelligence expert to visit city, talk at evening ceremony

Posted at 7:43 pm March 8, 2019
By Jessica Steed Leave a Comment

The cover of Kai-Fu Lee’s book, “AI Superpowers.” (Submitted)

Kai-Fu Lee—a world-leading artificial intelligence expert, venture capitalist, writer, and former president of Google China—is planning a visit to Oak Ridge on May 6, a press release said.

Lee, a 1979 Oak Ridge High School graduate, will visit his former schools, St. Mary’s Catholic School and Oak Ridge Schools, meeting with students and teachers during the day, the press release said.

The public is invited to an evening ceremony at Pollard Auditorium including a reception beginning at 5:30 p.m. and Lee’s talk at 6:30. This community event will be hosted by the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation, UT-Battelle, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and Friends of ORNL. Lee will be available to sign his most recent best-selling book, “AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order.” Copies of the book will be available for purchase, the press release said. [Read more…]

Earthquake hazard in East Tennessee: What could happen here?

Posted at 4:20 pm March 7, 2019
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

Robert Hatcher

Could we have a major earthquake in East Tennessee? Do we live in an active seismic zone?

These and other questions will be addressed by Robert Hatcher, University of Tennessee distinguished scientist emeritus, in a lecture, “Living with East Tennessee Geology and Earthquakes,” in Oak Ridge in April.

The lecture is scheduled from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in the University of Tennessee Arboretum Auditorium at 901 South Illinois Avenue in Oak Ridge.

Hatcher was a faculty member for 32 years in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Science Alliance Center of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, a press release said. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Vanderbilt University and his doctorate at the University of Tennessee. [Read more…]

NOAA building in Oak Ridge closed due to government shutdown

Posted at 3:29 pm January 11, 2019
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The NOAA building on South Illinois Avenue, shown above on Friday, Jan. 11, 2019, has a sign posted on the front door announcing that it is closed due to the partial shutdown of the federal government. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration building in Oak Ridge is closed due to the partial shutdown of the federal government, which is now three weeks old and approaching a record length.

NOAA is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is one of nine cabinet-level departments affected by the partial government shutdown. The shutdown, which mostly hinges on a dispute between President Donald Trump and Democrats in Congress over whether to allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a wall on the border with Mexico, also affects the Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the federal judiciary, and other related government programs.

About 380,000 workers were to be sent home and not be paid for their time off during the shutdown, the New York Times reported. Another 420,000 deemed too essential to be furloughed are being forced to work without pay, the newspaper said. After past shutdowns, such workers have been reimbursed later.

It wasn’t immediately clear Friday afternoon how many NOAA workers in Oak Ridge, part of an air research laboratory that has a division here, have been furloughed and how many, if any, are being forced to work without pay. A sign posted on the front door announced that the building is closed due to the shutdown. [Read more…]

Map: How common are earthquakes in the area?

Posted at 7:10 pm January 6, 2019
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

The recent 4.4 magnitude earthquake near Decatur that was felt in Oak Ridge, and other reported earthquakes since then, made us wonder: How common are earthquakes in the area?

Minor earthquakes, those that can’t be felt, are fairly common, according to a customized search of data available through the U.S. Geological Survey.

There were 247 earthquakes in a roughly three-year period in an area outlined by a custom-drawn map that includes much of East Tennessee and part of western North Carolina.

But with one exception, all of the earthquakes were 3.0 magnitude or less. Earthquakes that weak are generally not felt. [Read more…]

Seven ORNL researchers named 2019 INCITE award winners

Posted at 1:01 pm November 21, 2018
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jeremy Smith is studying the recalcitrance of biomass to enable cheaper, more efficient biofuels, and other high-value chemicals. (Image courtesy ORNL)

Seven researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been chosen by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, also known as INCITE, program to lead scientific investigations that require the nation’s most powerful computers, a press release said.

INCITE awards computing time via a proposal process to researchers seeking to harness the power of DOE computing systems at the Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities to solve some of the world’s greatest scientific challenges, the press release said.

Since INCITE’s inception in 2004, the ALCF and OLCF have continuously undergone significant upgrades to retain their edge in facilitating the most computationally demanding scientific projects. The ALCF’s most recent machine is Theta, an 11.69-petaflop Cray XC40 system whose 280,000-plus cores make it ideal for research at the nexus of simulation, data science, and machine learning. An even more powerful system, the exascale Aurora, is planned for deployment in 2021 and is projected to be capable of a quintillion (one billion billion) calculations per second. [Read more…]

ORNL technologies receive six R&D 100 Awards

Posted at 11:19 am November 21, 2018
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

Using the Atomic Forge, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers brought two, three, and four silicon atoms together to build clusters (green) and make them rotate within a layer of graphene (blue). (Image courtesy ORNL)

By Shelby Whitehead and Sean Simoneau

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have received six R&D 100 Awards in recognition of their significant advancements in science and technology, a press release said. The honorees were recognized over the weekend at the 56th annual R&D 100 Conference, which is sponsored by R&D Magazine.

The awards, known as the “Oscars of Invention,” honor research and development pioneers and their revolutionary breakthroughs in materials science, biomedicine, consumer products, and more from academia, industry, and government-sponsored research agencies, the press release said. This year’s six honors bring ORNL’s total of R&D 100 awards to 216 since their inception in 1963.

ORNL researchers were recognized for the following innovations: [Read more…]

Supercomputers: Summit at ORNL still number one

Posted at 11:29 am November 12, 2018
By John Huotari Leave a Comment

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, June 25, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer was again named number one on the TOP500 List, a semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest computing systems on Monday, Nov. 12, 2018. (Photo credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy)

The 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory stayed at number one on the semiannual TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers released Monday.

The Sierra supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, climbed to number two from number three. That means the United States now has the top two systems in the world, a position that China held a year ago.

Summit, a water-cooled IBM-built supercomputer, debuted at number one on the TOP500 list in June. That was the first time since 2012 that the United States had the most powerful supercomputer in the world. The earlier top system, Titan, a Cray machine, is also located at ONRL. ORNL and LLNL are both U.S. Department of Energy laboratories.

Officials celebrated the launch of Summit in a ceremony attended by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on June 8. The supercomputer is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. That makes it about about eight times more powerful than Titan, its predecessor.

Besides being the most powerful, Summit has been described as the world’s smartest supercomputer, a machine that can learn. As big as two tennis courts, Summit has 4,608 compute servers. Each has two 22-core IBM Power9 central processing units (CPUs) and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators. That’s more than 9,000 conventional processors and nearly 28,000 graphics processors, or about 37,000 total. [Read more…]

Power of Synergy Space Symposium at New Hope Center this week

Posted at 1:22 pm October 22, 2018
By Oak Ridge Today Staff Leave a Comment

John Rather and Dean Hartley examine same-scale globes of the Earth, Moon, and Mars. (Submitted photo)

A Power of Synergy Space Symposium will be at New Hope Center in Oak Ridge this week.

The symposium will include leaders from NASA, U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Y-12 National Security Complex, industry, and academia, a press release said.

The Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop will be hosting the unique symposium in order to promote safe, fast, and affordable human development of the solar system, the press release said. The speakers will discuss and advocate breakthrough technologies to enable routine transportation to permanent colonies on the moon and the first human trips to Mars within a decade.

More information about the symposium can be found on the website at https://tviw.us/tviw-symposium-on-the-power-of-synergy/. Registration is also available on the website; the fee includes breaks, lunches, and receptions, the press release said.

Here is more information from the press release: [Read more…]